{
  "slug": "ai-referral-session-change",
  "name": "AI referral session change",
  "aliases": [
    "Assistant referral trend",
    "AI referral session delta"
  ],
  "definition": "The movement in assistant-referred sessions between two comparable periods, in sessions and as a relative change.",
  "category": "AI referral traffic",
  "type": "derived metric",
  "unit": "sessions for the absolute move; the relative move inherits the product's contested delta-percent scale",
  "direction": "higher-better",
  "verification": "review",
  "aggregation": "A comparison between two period reads, not a measure that aggregates. Both periods must use the same source/medium selection or the change describes the selection rather than the traffic.",
  "grain": "One traffic-source value (or the whole-domain total) across a pair of date ranges.",
  "dimensions": [
    "source/medium",
    "landing page",
    "country",
    "device"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "date range",
    "comparison date range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "web-analytics"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "ai-referral-traffic-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "search-to-revenue",
    "significance-referee",
    "anomaly-investigator"
  ],
  "verbs": [],
  "rungs": [
    "R5"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L7"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Is AI referral traffic growing?",
    "Did assistant referrals move enough to matter this month?"
  ],
  "caveats": [
    "Inherits the classification blocker: if the hand-picked source list differs between the two periods, the change is an artefact of the selection.",
    "The relative change is returned as a fraction by one part of the product and as a percent by another, so a delta percent is ambiguous until you know which produced it.",
    "At the volumes typical for assistant referrals, most period-over-period moves fail a significance test, report the trend across several periods rather than one comparison.",
    "A per-source time series is available, the trend mode combines with a traffic-source breakdown for exactly this, but a comparison range and a trend are still separate modes, so a two-period delta and a series are two reads, not one."
  ],
  "freshness": "loads nightly, a same-day question gets yesterday's number, labelled as yesterday's.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Quoting a triple-digit percentage growth that rests on a move from nine sessions to twenty-eight.",
    "Reading a delta percent as a percent when the module that produced it returned a fraction."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [],
  "related": [
    "ai-referral-sessions",
    "pop-delta",
    "pop-delta-pct",
    "real-noise-verdict"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}