Traffic sources

The “Sources” tab, in the Referrals box, divides your content into a few buckets based on where the traffic came from, which you can then filter.

• Direct
• Paid/Campaign
• Organic
• Social
• AI

Here’s exactly how we organize pageviews into the five buckets above, based on where each visitor came from:

Direct

We group a visitor as “Direct” if they don’t have a referrer. This can happen for two reasons: the first is they typed your website directly into their browser URL bar, and the second is because the website they were on stripped the referrer before sending that visitor to your site (we cannot control this, as it’s something set on the referring site).

Paid/Campaign

We group a visitor as “Paid/Campaign” if the page they landed on has a UTM parameter, or if they have one of the following two parameters: msclkid or gclid. These mean the visitor clicked to your site from a paid Google ad or Bing ad. The one exception is a link from an AI tool that only adds utm_source (see AI below).

Social

We group a visitor as “Social” if the referring source comes from: LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest or Flippa. The only reason we’d not group a visitor as “Social” if they came from a social site is if that social site stripped the referrer (which does happen, and is nothing we can control).

Mastodon intentionally does not send referrer information on outgoing links (to protect privacy), therefore we cannot track links from Mastodon, unless you use a UTM from Mastodon.

Organic

We group a visitor as “Organic” if they don’t fit into the above buckets. I.e. if they came from any referring site that isn’t a social site or an AI tool (a common search engine like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, Brave and Yandex, or any other website that links to you) AND the page they landed on doesn’t have a UTM, msclkid or gclid.

AI

We group a visitor as “AI” if they came from an AI tool: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI, You.com or Poe. We count a visit as AI in either of these cases:

• The AI tool sent a referrer. For example, the visitor clicked a link on claude.ai or perplexity.ai.
• The link has the AI tool as its utm_source and no other campaign tags. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it shows, and its apps often send no referrer, so this is how most ChatGPT visits arrive.

If the link also has a utm_medium or utm_campaign (for example, an ad you run on an AI tool), the visit stays in Paid/Campaign.

This applies to all of your history, not only to new visits. To see each AI tool, open the AI tab next to Sources. It lists your AI visitors by tool (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and so on), with each tool’s links and referrers combined: ChatGPT includes chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com and links tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com. Click a tool to filter your dashboard with “AI Source is ChatGPT”, for example. You can also choose AI as the Referrer Source, or type a tool name as the AI Source, in Advanced Filters.

The same data is in our API: group or filter on referrer_source (with the value AI) or on ai_source (with a tool name, such as ChatGPT).

This measures visits to your website, not how often an AI tool mentions you or the prompts people enter. If an AI tool sends neither a referrer nor a utm_source, we cannot tell the visit came from AI, and it shows as Direct.