Analyzing visits from ChatGPT and others in AI referrals

The KI-Verweise (AI referrals) tab in Traffic Overview shows how many people reach your website through an AI answer, which source sent them, and which pages they land on. This article explains how KI Score detects these visits and how to read each card.

The data only appears if your website reports page views to KI Score from the server side. You'll find the setup in the sidebar under Einstellungen → Traffic-Tracking (Settings → Traffic tracking); the article on the Server API explains the details. KI Score does not offer a JavaScript tracking snippet.

Which AI sources are detected

KI Score detects visits from exactly five sources:

• ChatGPT
• Perplexity
• Claude
• Gemini
• Copilot

Visits from other AI systems are not captured under KI-Verweise. Requests from AI crawlers don't count here either, because an AI referral is always a visit by a person. You'll find crawler requests in the KI-Crawler (AI crawlers) tab.

How a visit is attributed

For every page view reported, KI Score checks two signals:

• Referrer: the address the visit came from, for example chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai.
• utm_source: the parameter in the requested URL, such as utm_source=chatgpt.com.

If at least one of these signals matches one of the five sources, the visit is stored as an AI referral. For KI Score to read the utm_source parameter, your integration has to send the full URL, including the query string.

A visit counts once per session and source. If your integration doesn't send its own session ID, KI Score builds a daily visitor hash instead. Further page views by the same visitor from the same source on the same day then don't increase the count.

Referrals over time and top AI sources

At the top of the KI-Verweise tab, three metrics appear: Besuche über KI (visits via AI) with the number of unique sessions below it, KI-Quellen (AI sources), which tells you how many different AI systems sent visitors in the selected period, and Häufigste Quelle (top source) with its share of visits. You choose the period at the top under Zeitraum (period): a preset such as Letzte 7 Tage, Letzte 14 Tage, or Letzte 30 Tage (last 7, 14, or 30 days), or your own range in the calendar.

The Verweise im Zeitverlauf (referrals over time) card plots visits per day as lines. Days are grouped in German time (Europe/Berlin). To adjust the view:

1. In the sidebar, open KI-Traffic (AI traffic) → Traffic Overview.
2. Select the KI-Verweise tab.
3. Above the chart, click a source to hide or show its line.
4. If needed, hide the dashed Gesamt (total) line to compare individual sources more easily.

Today isn't over yet, so its value may be lower. Next to the chart, the Top-KI-Quellen (top AI sources) card uses bars to show the visits per AI system and their share of all visits in the period.

Landing pages and source detection

The Landingpages (landing pages) card lists the ten pages on your website where the most visitors from AI answers arrived. It shows each page's path without the query string, along with the Anzahl (count) of visits and their Anteil (share) of all AI visits.

The Erkennung der Quelle (source detection) card shows in its Erkannt über (detected via) column which signal was used to attribute the visits:

Tip: Visits under UTM-Parameter arrive without a matching referrer and are detected only through the URL parameter. If your integration sends the URL without its query string, these visits may be missing from your analysis.

Privacy: what gets stored

KI Score only stores detected AI crawlers and visits that come through one of the five AI sources. It doesn't store any other page views. KI Score does not store visitors' IP addresses. When there's no session ID, the daily visitor hash is used for counting. For each detected visit, KI Score stores the source, the attribution method, the page visited, the referrer, the UTM parameters, and the user agent, among other details.

As the website operator, you are responsible for informing your website's visitors.