Update GA4 Channel Group For Gen AI Referral Traffic
See, at a glance, how much traffic Generative AI sites like chatGPT and Perplexity are sending to your website in GA4 Acquisition Channel Reports
Create a new Channel Group if you don’t already have one in use
Define the new Channel Name and Rules based on domain named like chatgpt.com
Re-order the new channel above the Referral channel so that it is prioritised and populated first
capture Gen AI Traffic From Referral Bucket
At the time of writing, Google haven’t updated any rules or created a new category for this traffic. By default it is categorised under Referral. We want to see how much Gen AI site traffic is growing in its own right and to compare against other Organic Traffic.
The screengrab below shows the Primary Channel Group capturing this traffic as Referral and Gen AI is about 60% of all Referral traffic on this site! I want to know about this without having to drill into Secondary Dimensions or create custom reports!
1. Create a new Channel Group
Make a copy of the default group if you haven’t already set this up.
In GA4 Navigate to Settings > Data Display > Channel Groups and then click on the 3 dots to “Create a Copy”
I like to name it “Detailed channel group” and update the description to “Copy of…”
2. Define the new Channel Name and Rules
Edit the new Channel Group by Adding an New Channel which I creatively named “Gen AI” with some Rules to capture this traffic:
Medium = Referral
Source matches Regex :
chatgpt\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com
This rule can be expanded as more Gen AI referrals come in over time.
3. Re-order the new channel above the Referral channel
The Channel’s order in the list is important as this is the order, from top to bottom, that the rules are applied and any traffic that matches the rule is bucketed into this channel. Think of it like a waterfall.
As the new Rule is more specific than the generic “Referral” rule as long as it is moved into a position above this then it will be good.
The View We End Up With in GA4
The result is available immediately in GA4 and it is applied to historical reporting. GA4 will generate the “User” Channel Group from the “Session” Channel group as shown in the screengrab below where I’ve navigated to the User Acquisition report and selected the new User Detailed Channel Grouping drop-down as the Primary Dimension.
In this wider context we can see that Gen AI traffic is only 2% of all traffic, Referral is slightly less and 75% comes from Organic (indicating resource is put mainly into onsite content with no link-building (referral links back to site).
