AI chat products often open links without a normal referrer. In a standard analytics report, that visit looks like Direct. CiteTrack separates likely AI assistant sessions into their own channel so you can measure the traffic instead of losing it in a bucket called direct / none.
What counts as AI Assistants
CiteTrack looks at known AI referrers, AI-related campaign values and privacy-safe first-party session evidence. If a user arrives from an AI assistant and later navigates internally, CiteTrack records one acquisition for the visit instead of counting every page as a new AI referral.
What it does not claim
An AI Assistant session means CiteTrack detected an AI-sourced visit. It does not automatically prove that a specific citation caused the visit, and it cannot recover cross-device journeys or browsers that block every relevant signal. Treat the number as a strong floor, not a magic attribution oracle.
How to use it
- Compare AI Assistants against Direct to see how much “direct” traffic may actually be AI-driven.
- Open Landing pages to see which pages receive those sessions.
- Use Attribution and Reports when you need evidence from crawl to citation to visit to conversion.