How to see visits from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity in Google Analytics 4

The short answer

In GA4, visits from AI assistants appear in the Traffic acquisition report. Since May 2026, Google has added a separate AI Assistant channel to the default channel group. To see all the AI sources you need, including those Google doesn't recognise, create a custom channel group with a regular expression. Bear in mind that GA4 sees only part of AI traffic.

Menu names below are given as they appear in the English GA4 interface.

Method 1. The AI Assistant channel in the standard reports

1. Open Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
2. Set the primary dimension to Session default channel group.
3. Find the AI Assistant row.

According to GA4's description of the default channels, AI Assistant is the channel through which users arrive from sources such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot or Grok. A session also falls into this channel if the medium equals ai-assistant. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are not included.

Limitations: Google doesn't publish a full list of AI sources in the channel description, and according to the release notes the channel appeared on 13 May 2026. So data from before that date most likely sits in the Referral channel.

Method 2. Look at specific sources

1. In the Traffic acquisition report, change the primary dimension to Session source / medium.
2. In the search box above the table, type the name of a source, for example chatgpt.

The main AI assistant domains:

To see which pages these visitors land on, add the secondary dimension Landing page or use the Landing page report in the same section.

Method 3. A custom channel group with a regex

A custom channel group gives you control over the list of sources and, unlike the new default channel, also applies to data you've already collected. Instructions are in Google's help centre. You need the Editor role or higher.

1. Admin → Data display → Channel groups.
2. Click Create new channel group — GA4 will create a copy of the default group.
3. Click Add new channel and name it, for example, "AI assistants".
4. Add a condition: dimension Source → matches regex → paste the expression .*(chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|gemini\.google\.com|perplexity\.ai|copilot\.microsoft\.com|claude\.ai|chat\.deepseek\.com|grok\.com|chat\.mistral\.ai).* (the .* wrapper is needed so that the expression also works for subdomains such as www.perplexity.ai). Add other domains if needed.
5. Save the channel and use Reorder to drag it above Referral. GA4 assigns a session to the first channel whose condition it matches, so otherwise AI visits will end up in Referral.
6. Save the group and select it as the primary dimension in the Traffic acquisition report.

A standard property can have two custom channel groups.

Method 4. Explorations

For more detailed analysis, open Explore → Free form:

• rows: Session source and Landing page + query string;
• values: Sessions, Engaged sessions, Key events;
• filter: Session source matches the same regular expression.

This shows which pages AI assistants bring visitors to and whether those visits convert.

Limitations to be aware of

Many AI visits arrive without a referrer. ChatGPT or Gemini mobile apps, copying a link from an answer, browser privacy settings — in these cases GA4 doesn't know where the user came from and counts the session as Direct. The AI Assistant channel won't help here.

ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com. According to OpenAI's publishers FAQ, ChatGPT automatically adds this parameter to links in its search answers. So the session gets chatgpt.com as its source even without a referrer. But this doesn't happen with every link, and the behaviour may change.

AI Overviews and AI Mode look like ordinary Google. GA4 shows visits from them as google / organic. Impressions and clicks from these features are included in the Search Console Performance report for the Web search type, but aren't broken out separately (Google documentation).

Visits aren't the whole of visibility. A user may get an answer in which you were recommended and come back later directly or through a brand search. So GA4 is worth supplementing with data on what exactly AI answers. More in the article how AI visibility differs from SEO.

What to do with this data

• Compare month-on-month trends in AI traffic rather than absolute numbers.
• Look at which landing pages get visits: those are the ones AI cites.
• Compare this with how often AI mentions your brand — answer monitoring shows that. AI Visibility checks answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode every day and, if you wish, shows Google Search Console data alongside (read-only access).

How to check for your business

GA4 shows who has already arrived. To see whether AI names your brand at all, run a free live check in ChatGPT. You can get daily data from four platforms during the free first week.