Most AI chat apps open your link without sending a referrer, so GA4 (and every other analytics tool) files the visit under direct / none, making AI look like it sends no traffic when it actually does.
How CiteTrack fixes it
CiteTrack sets a first-party session cookie and combines referrer, UTM and known-AI-host detection to correctly label sessions that came from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, including the no-referrer ones, which it flags as recovered “direct” traffic. Those sessions then feed attribution and the AI→leads funnel.
Get the most accurate picture
- Keep the Attribution module enabled under Settings so sessions are tagged as they arrive.
- Turn on the GA4 push integration to send an
ai_referralevent into GA4, so your AI traffic is visible in Google’s own reports too. - Where you control the link (newsletters, your llms.txt), add UTMs: CiteTrack reads them for an exact source.
Recovery is best-effort: if a visitor blocks cookies or arrives days later on a different device, that session can’t be linked. The numbers are a strong floor, not a perfect count.