AI referral traffic report
also called AI sessions reportAssistant referral reportGenerative AI trafficLLM referral traffic
Being cited is R3; being visited is R5. This report reads the analytics side, sessions arriving from AI assistant referrers, which pages they land on, and whether they convert, and sits next to the AI visibility report as its outcome half. Volumes are small in absolute terms for most sites, which is exactly why it is reported as a trend with its own scale rather than as a share of total traffic.
Who it is for, and what it settles
- Audience
- In-house strategist
- Job to be done
- Measure the sessions and conversions that AI assistants actually send, so citation work can be tied to an outcome.
- Cadence
- Monthly
The metrics, in three tiers
Headline numbers carry the story. Diagnostics explain a headline that moved. Guardrails stop a wrong conclusion. Every row links to the definition, the formula, the caveats and what the metric is not all live on the metric page.
Headline What you lead with 4
Diagnostic Reached for when a headline moves 8
- AI referral source split share percent of assistant-referred sessions attributed to each traffic-source value
- Sessions raw measure sessions
- Users raw measure users
- Conversions raw measure conversions
- Conversion rate rate fraction of users
- Unique pageviews raw measure unique pageviews
- Transaction revenue monetary revenue in the currency configured in your analytics property
- Citations per cited page raw measure citations
Guardrail Stops the wrong conclusion 4
- Real, noise or can't-tell statistical verdict one of real, noise, can't-tell
- Practical magnitude statistical verdict not produced
- Conversion-rate change derived metric difference between two rates, on whatever scale the underlying rate measure carries, rounded to two decimal places
- Period-over-period change, relative derived metric relative change
Required data sources
Skills that produce or interpret it
Method rungs covered
- R1 Reachable , not covered
- R2 Retrieved , not covered
- R3 Referenced , not covered
- R4 Represented , not covered
- R5 Rewarded , covered
It reads the upper rungs only. If a lower rung is broken, fix that before you present this, a report that never checks whether pages can be reached will keep reporting movement that may not be yours.
Ask for it in one sentence
The prompt pack for this report, copy one, or watch it play in the simulator.
- "How much traffic do AI assistants send us?" Simulate this → Prompt gallery →
- "Do AI referral visits convert?" Simulate this → Prompt gallery →
- "Which pages do AI assistants send people to?" Simulate this → Prompt gallery →
- "Is AI referral traffic growing?" Simulate this → Prompt gallery →
What to say out loud when you present it
AI referral traffic depends entirely on how the analytics property classifies those referrers; assistants that strip or rewrite the referrer are invisible here, so this is a floor and not a total. Session counts are small enough that week-over-week percentage swings are usually noise, report the trend. Cited pages and landing pages are different lists and will not match.
Related workflows and use cases
Watch a run that builds this report
All runs →
3 min 4 secThe fix shipped. Traffic rose. Now two teams want the credit.Lighthouse + Search Console + Rank tracking · Significance referee · Cross domain correlator◐Recreated from an anonymized session
1 min 55 secChatGPT cites us. Does any of it become revenue?AI visibility + Web analytics · Search to revenue◐Recreated from an anonymized session
How this entry was verified
Knowing the contents is step one.
Someone still has to assemble it, defend the numbers and present it. Here is the rest of the showcase.