AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Perplexity, and Gemini by Google are growing in popularity and referring significant traffic to websites. As a type of traffic, this source of traffic should be tracked separately by webmasters in the same way that Social Media, Organic Search, and Paid Ad Traffic is currently tracked today.

You can argue that it should like under "Organic Search" but it has it's own characteristics that, for now, mean it's better off being tracked as it's own thing.

Here's the simple way to setup Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track this as a channel group:

Step 1 – Go to Admin > Data Display > Channel Groups

Step 2 – Click Create New Channel Group

Step 3 – Create Channel Name and Click "Add new channel"

On the next screen that pops up, click "Add new channel" (no need to add the name yet).

Step 4 – Name the channel group, and click "+Add group condition"

Now we name the group of traffic: I've used the name "AI Chat Site Traffic" but use whatever will make the most sense to you when you read it in the future. Then click "+ Add condition group".

Step 5 – List the AI traffic sources using matching regex

Select "Source" from the drop down, and then select Conditions = "matches regex". Now, input all the AI traffic sites you'd like to group into this channel. Here's what we use, and you can copy and paste:

openai.com|claude.ai|gemini.google.com|perplexity.ai|copilot.microsoft.com|jasper.ai|komo.ai|andisearch.com

Then click "Save Channel"

Step 6 – Confirm the Channel is there

You can do this by scrolling to the bottom.

You can now view the how much of your traffic, and site usage comes from AI Chat Sites.