This week our Google Analytics started showing something new: chatgpt.com / ai-assistant as a source/medium row. Two visitors. Tiny, right? But it's the first time "an AI answered a question and someone clicked through to us" showed up as a measurable channel.
What it looks like in GA4
Reports → User acquisition, then switch the primary dimension to First user source/medium — that's the table where chatgpt.com / ai-assistant showed up for us. (Traffic acquisition has the session-scoped equivalent under Session source/medium.) Since May 2026, GA4 also ships a native AI Assistant default channel group, so ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini referrals get their own line instead of hiding in "Referral". Perplexity is not in that native definition yet — perplexity.ai / referral still folds into Referral, which makes it the quiet one to watch.
Three things worth doing this week
1. Segment AI sources explicitly. The native channel catches some of them, but one segment gives you the unified view:
chatgpt.com|chat.openai.com|perplexity.ai|copilot.microsoft.com|gemini.google.com
Watch it weekly like you'd watch a new paid channel.
2. Check what AI says about you. Ask the 3-4 questions your buyers actually ask ("best [your category] for small teams") in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Note whether you appear, and who does.
3. Feed the answers, not just the crawler. Getting mentioned in AI answers correlates with being cited in the sources they retrieve: comparison pages, listicles, Reddit threads, structured FAQs on your own site.
Why this matters more for small teams
Enterprise brands will buy visibility tooling. Small teams can win by being early: your competitors' analytics probably don't even have this segment yet. The cost of checking is ten minutes; the cost of being invisible in the shortlist phase is the whole deal.
Disclosure: I'm building SupaMarketers, a toolkit that helps small marketing teams with research, content, and tracking things like AI visibility. This post is the observation, not a pitch — the GA4 steps above work with or without any tool.
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