How do you see AI assistant traffic in Google Analytics?

Most practices I talk to see almost no AI traffic in their analytics, while their front desk hears patients say they asked ChatGPT first. Both things can be true, and the reason is worth understanding before you spend an afternoon building reports.

Where does AI assistant traffic show up in GA4?

In the Traffic acquisition report, under the AI Assistant channel. Google’s default channel definitions describe it as visits from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot or Grok. GA4 sets the medium to “ai-assistant” when the referrer matches its list of assistants, so these visits no longer sit mixed into Referral.

1. In GA4, open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition.
2. Set the primary dimension to Session default channel group and find the AI Assistant row.
3. Switch the dimension to Session source / medium to see which assistants are sending visits.
4. Add Landing page as a secondary dimension to see which pages the assistants linked to.
5. Set the date range to at least 90 days. Most practices get a handful of these visits a month, and a week tells you nothing.

Google describes the channel with the words “sources like”, and it doesn’t publish the full list behind it. So check where Perplexity and Claude visits land in your property. If they appear as Referral rather than AI Assistant, the custom group further down catches them.

Why is Google’s AI Mode traffic not in the AI Assistant channel?

Because Google counts it as search. The AI Assistant channel explicitly excludes Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the Organic Search channel explicitly includes them. A patient who clicks your link inside an AI Overview arrives as ordinary organic Google traffic, and GA4 cannot separate that click from a click on a blue link.

For the Google side, Search Console is the better tool. Its Generative AI performance report shows how often links to your site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country and device. Google says the report reached all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026. It counts impressions, the times your link was shown, which is closer to “were we named” than any click report.

How do you tell a ChatGPT visit apart from other traffic?

Look for utm_source=chatgpt.com. OpenAI says ChatGPT automatically adds that tag to the links it sends from search results, so publishers can track the traffic in tools such as Google Analytics. In GA4 it appears as chatgpt.com in the Session source dimension. Blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps your pages out of those answers, though OpenAI notes a bare link can still surface.

The tag also helps with visits that lose their referrer on the way, which happens with some apps and privacy settings. A visit carrying the chatgpt.com tag is identifiable even without one. A visit with no referrer and no tag can’t be traced to an assistant by any report, and GA4 will file it under another channel.

Should you build a custom channel group for AI traffic?

Only if the default channel misses assistants your patients use. Google’s help page walks through creating an “AI assistants” channel with a regular expression that matches assistant domains, then placing it above Referral so matching visits land there first. Custom channel groups apply to your reports retroactively, so your past data is reclassified.

1. Go to Admin, then Data display, then Channel groups, and click Create new channel group. It starts as a copy of the default group.
2. Add a channel named AI assistants, with the condition Session source matches regex, and a pattern covering the domains you found in step 3 above, such as perplexity and claude.
3. Reorder the channels so AI assistants sits above Referral. GA4 puts each visit in the first channel it matches.
4. Save, then select your new group as the primary dimension in Traffic acquisition.
5. Compare the result against the Session source list to confirm nothing unrelated got caught by the pattern.

Two limits to know. A standard GA4 property can hold only two custom channel groups, so don’t burn them on experiments. And you need Editor access or above on the property to create one.

What will analytics never show you?

The answers where you were named and nobody clicked. A patient who reads “three practices near you accept this insurance” and then phones you arrives in no referral report. That is why AI visibility is measured two ways: clicks in analytics, and a fixed list of patient questions checked by hand every month.

The first number tells you what the answers are worth in visits. The second tells you whether you are in the answers at all. A practice that only watches GA4 will under-count this channel every month and decide it doesn’t matter. Add “How did you hear about us?” to your new-patient intake with an AI assistant option, and you’ll have a third number that is often the most useful of the three.