I keep getting some version of this question from founders: "Everyone says AI search sends traffic now. Okay. Where do I actually see it?"

Short version? Some of it's already sitting in your reports, blended in with the rest. Some of it you can pull out with one filter. And a chunk of it you'll never see in analytics, because nobody clicked anything.

I went back to what Google and OpenAI say in their own docs, so you don't have to take my word for any of this.

Google: it's already in Search Console

Google's AI features guide is pretty direct. Sites that show up in AI Overviews and AI Mode "are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console," inside the Performance report under the "Web" search type.

No extra setup. The clicks are there. They just don't get their own row.

The fine print is on Google's Performance report help page, and a couple of details surprised me:

  • An AI Overview counts as one position. Every link inside it gets that same position, whether it's the first source or the fifth.
  • In AI Mode, a follow-up question counts as a brand new query, with its own impressions and clicks.
  • Search Labs experiments aren't in the data at all.

Why care? Because of what it does to your numbers. If one of your pages gets pulled into an AI Overview, its average position for that query can jump to something you never earned in the classic blue links. When I see a weird position jump like that, I search the query myself before celebrating.

And those AI Mode follow-ups tend to be long, chatty questions. If your query list starts filling up with full sentences, there's a decent chance that's where they're coming from.

ChatGPT: one filter does it

This one's easier. OpenAI's publishers and developers FAQ says ChatGPT "automatically includes the UTM parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com in referral URLs."

So in your analytics tool, filter sessions by source chatgpt.com and save it as a view. Done.

Two small gotchas. If you run your own UTM campaigns, make sure nothing in your setup renames or merges that source. I'd test it once: find an answer in ChatGPT that links to you, click it, and watch the real-time report.

Also, check robots.txt. OpenAI's crawler docs say OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces sites in ChatGPT search. Block it and you shouldn't expect this traffic. Worth ruling out before you decide ChatGPT just doesn't like you.

Perplexity and the rest

I couldn't find a Perplexity doc promising a UTM tag like OpenAI's. What I do instead is look for perplexity.ai in the referrer report and save that too. It's a rough number though. Apps and privacy settings can strip referrers, so I treat it as "direction" rather than "count".

The part analytics can't show you

Everything above is a click. Someone read an answer, then left it and landed on your site.

What it misses:

  • answers that named you but got no click,
  • the competitor that got named instead,
  • answers that described your product wrong.

For a young product that gap is huge. Honestly, your first sign of progress is usually a mention, not a visit. Watch only clicks and you could sit through a month of slow gains, or slow losses, and not notice either.

There's no shortcut for mentions. You ask. I'd keep a short list of questions a customer would really type, the same list every time, and run it through Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity every week. Jot down who got named and which page was linked. That's it.

My weekly routine, roughly

  1. Export last week from Search Console (Web search type). Clicks, impressions, any new question-shaped queries.
  2. Open the saved chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai views. Sessions, and where they landed.
  3. Run the question list. Named or not, which URL, who else showed up.
  4. Write one line about what I changed on the site that week.

Step 4 is the one people skip. It's also the one that makes the other three useful a month later.

Where Serpair fits

Disclosure: I work at Serpair. We built it to track this growth journey for you: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini mention your site, plus the technical SEO and backlink side, with history kept so you can see what moved.

If you'd like a baseline before starting your own log, there's a free Insights check, no sign-up.

But really, the routine above runs fine on free tools. Just start writing things down this week. Future you will want something to compare against.