Traffic from ChatGPT is nice. Sales from it are better.

An AI channel, next to Search and Social

Every visit in ownlytics gets a channel: Organic Search, Organic Social, AI, Referral, Email, Paid, Affiliate or Direct. A visit lands in AI when its referrer or its utm_source is one of these assistants:

Assistant	Recognized as
ChatGPT	chatgpt.com (old chat.openai.com links are folded in)
Claude	claude.ai
Perplexity	perplexity.ai
Gemini	gemini.google.com (and the old bard.google.com)
Microsoft Copilot	copilot.microsoft.com
Others	you.com, phind.com, chat.deepseek.com, deepseek.com, grok.com, meta.ai, chat.mistral.ai, poe.com, kimi.com, notebooklm.google.com

Tagged links count too: ?utm_source=chatgpt, ?utm_source=perplexity or ?ref=claude on a link you share map to the same sources. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode send visitors from google.com, so they stay in Organic Search, which is also how Google Analytics files them.

What each assistant actually sends

An AI visit is only visible if the click carries something that names the assistant. Here is what you can count on:

• ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links in its answers, according to OpenAI's publisher FAQ, and the web app usually passes chatgpt.com as the referrer as well. Either one is enough. The full walkthrough is in how to track ChatGPT traffic.
• Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot show up through the referrer of their web apps. See tracking Perplexity traffic.
• Mobile apps and copy-paste are where it breaks. A link opened from an assistant's app can arrive with no referrer, and a URL someone copies out of an answer into a browser never has one. Those visits look like any other unlabeled visit.

ownlytics doesn't pretend to know more than the browser tells it. A new visitor who lands on a deep page with no referrer goes to Direct · shared link, not into one mystery bucket, so you can at least see how much unlabeled traffic arrives on the pages assistants tend to cite.

Revenue per assistant, not just visits

Visits from AI answers are often small in number and high in intent: someone asked for a tool like yours and clicked the one that was recommended. Whether that's true for your site is the thing worth measuring. Connect Stripe, Polar, Dodo Payments or Creem and every payment is credited to the visit that brought the buyer, so the AI channel shows:

• Revenue and sales per assistant, with conversion rate and revenue per visitor next to Search and Social.
• Lifetime value by first source: renewals and upgrades stay with the source that first brought the customer, so a ChatGPT referral that subscribes for a year counts as a year.
• Path to purchase: buyers often find you in one place and buy after a later visit. You see the source that found them next to the one credited with the sale, and the attribution model (last non-direct, first touch or last touch) is your choice per site.
• A Telegram message for every sale, naming its source, so the day ChatGPT starts recommending you, you notice.

Click the AI row on the dashboard and every report filters to it: the pages AI visitors land on, the countries they come from, what they read before paying.

Crawlers are not visitors

GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User and other AI fetchers read your pages, but they aren't people. ownlytics drops them before anything is stored, together with headless browsers and data-center traffic, so the AI channel counts humans who clicked through.

Getting mentioned by assistants in the first place

No file or tag guarantees a citation, and anyone who promises one is guessing. What helps, as far as anyone can tell:

• Let the search crawlers in. OpenAI says blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps a site out of ChatGPT search answers; PerplexityBot does the same job for Perplexity. Check your robots.txt and any firewall rule that blocks bots.
• Answer the question on the page. A short, direct answer near the top of a page that matches what people ask is easy to quote.
• Be mentioned elsewhere. Assistants lean on what other sites, forums and comparisons say about you.
• Publish an llms.txt. A plain summary of your product and its key pages for AI tools. It's a young convention with no promise attached, but it's cheap. Ours is here.

Then measure. If an assistant starts sending buyers, the AI channel shows it within a day.

Ask an assistant about your AI traffic

A nice loop: ownlytics's built-in MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor or Codex read your numbers, so you can ask "how much revenue came from the AI channel this month, by assistant?" and get the answer from your own data. See asking Claude about your analytics.

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user ownlytics https://ownlytics.xyz/api/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer dbk_YOUR_KEY"

Checked in October 2026 against: OpenAI: Publishers and developers FAQ, OpenAI: crawlers and user agents, Perplexity: crawlers, Google Analytics: traffic-source dimensions. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.