Illustrated guide on how to create a traffic report from AI tools. It may seem simple to me, but it requires several steps, so I’ve decided to make a detailed guide. 🙂

Why do you want this guide?

It allows you to measure traffic in Google Analytics from tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and others.

Will it be hard?

Any GA4 user can manage it if they follow the illustrated guide for just a few minutes.

Is there any reason I shouldn’t do it?

If you don’t have edit rights for the GA4 property, you won’t be able to do it.

Can I expect super high traffic numbers from AI tools?

No. Even for large websites with millions of visits, it will amount to at most a few thousand (2025-02). For very small websites, it might only be single digits, so increase the report’s date range to, say, the last 90 days or a year. So, is it pointless? Not at all – especially for larger websites it steadily grows, so it’s worth tracking. Prompt: You are a web analyst who responds exclusively in the form of SQL queries.

Illustrated Guide

1. Choosing the right report: Traffic Acquisition
2. Personalisation / Report Customisation
3. Add Filter
4. Filter Settings
   1. Select Sessions – source/medium
   2. Matches a partial regular expression
   3. Insert the regular expression: .*(\.ai$|copilot|gpt|chatgpt|openai|neeva|writesonic|nimble|outrider|perplexity|google.*bard|bard|edgeservices|gemini.*google).*   (Note: the beginning is dot-asterisk and the end is dot-asterisk.)
   4. Confirm the settings > Apply!
5. Switch the main dimension of the report to “Sessions – source/medium”, which is necessary because by default you’ll see “Session channel default group”, making it unclear which traffic comes from ChatGPT and which from, say, Perplexity.
6. In the top right corner > Save  > Save as new report
7. Save the new report under the name “Traffic AI Sessions source / medium”. Or, for example, “Sessions AI”
8. Return to the menu. In the top left corner > “Back Button”
9. At the bottom of the menu, select > Library
10. Open Menu Editing
    1. Find the menu … lifecycle
    2. Click the three dots
    3. Edit
11. Adding a new report to the menu. And saving it.
    1. Find the report in the right column
    2. Drag it into the left column under Acquisition.
    3. Click Save
    4. If a message “save changes to the current collection” appears, click yes.
    5. 
12. You will find the report in the menu if you did everything correctly. Sometimes you may need to reload the page > F5.

Congratulations 🙂 You now have a new report.

Questions and Answers

Does it start measuring from now or does it apply to past data as well? It applies to past data as well.
Can you create a “comparison” out of it? No, because it does not support regular expressions.

Can it be used elsewhere? You can use the same condition with the regular expression to create a GA report in the “Explore” section.

I want to make a report on something else… Yes, you can similarly create a report on just Organic or PPC data; just change the filter and the report name.

I added the item to the menu, but it isn’t visible. Try reloading the page > F5.

What is the most common mistake when using this guide? In step 4, people either don’t click the Save button or they copy the regular expression incorrectly.

How can I extract more information? Add an extra dimension such as landing page + query by clicking the “+” next to the first column, and you’ll see which pages are receiving this AI traffic.