How to Track AI Traffic and AI Mentions

AI traffic is the set of visits that reach your site from links in AI answers. These visits are small, but they matter. At Ahrefs, AI search sent 0.5% of visits in 30 days. Those visits brought 12.1% of signups (Ahrefs, 2025). Your numbers will differ. But you cannot see the trend if you do not track it.

What are the 3 signals of AI traffic?

A property management company can track AI traffic with 3 signals. Each one fills a gap in the others.

Signal	What it tells you	Where to read it
AI referral visits	People clicked a link in an AI answer	GA4, Ahrefs Web Analytics
AI crawler visits	AI tools read your pages	Cloudflare, Ahrefs Bot Analytics, server logs
“How did you hear about us”	Landlords who asked AI, then came back by other routes	Your landlord form or CRM

The form answer matters most. Many landlords read an AI answer, then type your name into Google. Analytics counts that visit as search, not AI.

Step 1: How do you see AI visits in Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 has an AI Assistant channel in the default channel group. Google added it on May 13, 2026 (Search Engine Journal, 2026). You do not need to set it up.

1. Open the report. Go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. Set the dimension to “Session default channel group”.
2. Find the AI Assistant row. Google’s help page names ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot and Grok as examples (Google Analytics Help).
3. Add a custom channel group. The default list can miss Perplexity and Claude. In Admin, open Channel groups and copy the default group.
4. Add an “AI” channel. Set the condition “Source matches regex” to the pattern below. Move the channel above Referral, because GA4 uses the first channel that matches.

chatgpt\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|claude\.ai|copilot\.microsoft\.com

Watch for: the native channel does not count visits from before the rollout (Search Engine Journal, 2026). Compare months after June 2026 only.

Step 2: What does utm_source=chatgpt.com mean?

The tag utm_source=chatgpt.com means the visit came from a ChatGPT answer. ChatGPT adds this tag to links in its search results (OpenAI Help Center). GA4 shows it as the session source.

What to do: in GA4, add “Session source” as a secondary dimension. Look for chatgpt.com in both the referrer and the UTM tag. If your form tool saves UTM tags, a landlord lead can carry “chatgpt.com” into your CRM.

Why do AI visit counts look so low?

AI visit counts are low because part of the AI traffic hides in other channels. There are 3 main gaps.

• No referrer. Some AI links, for example from mobile apps, arrive with no referrer. GA4 counts them as Direct (Search Engine Journal, 2026).
• Google’s own AI. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode count as Organic Search, not AI Assistant (Google Analytics Help).
• Later visits. A landlord reads an answer today and searches your name next week.

Use AI visit counts for trends. A rise from 2 to 9 visits a month is a signal. The exact total is not.

Step 3: How do you see AI crawler visits?

AI crawler visits show which pages AI tools read. A bot that reads a page again and again is a sign that AI uses the page as a source. You have 3 options.

Tool	Cost	Note
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control	All plans	Free plan finds bots by user agent and shows the past 24 hours (Cloudflare Docs)
Ahrefs Bot Analytics	Free during beta	Needs a Cloudflare Worker; works on the Cloudflare free tier (Ahrefs Help)
Server logs	Free	Search for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot

Watch for fake bots. Anyone can send a GPTBot user agent. Scanners do this to probe files like /.env. Count only requests that got a normal page (HTTP 200).

What to do: check that your landlord pages get bot visits. If your management fee page never gets a visit, read the AI search checklist for property management websites.

Step 4: How do you ask landlords where they heard about you?

Add one question to your landlord contact form: “How did you hear about us?” Give choices: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google, Perplexity, a friend, other. Add a free text field too.

Ask the same question on the first call. Write the answer in your CRM. This signal catches the landlords that analytics misses. It also tells you which engine landlords in your city use. For more on how landlords use AI, read how landlords choose a property manager with AI.

Step 5: How do you check whether AI mentions your company?

Ask AI the questions your landlords ask, and record the answers. Do this once a month.

1. Write 10 to 20 landlord questions. Example: “Who is the best property manager for a duplex in Austin?” Keep the list the same each month.
2. Log out or use a private window. Your own history changes the answer.
3. Ask each engine. Use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Ask each question at least twice, because answers change from run to run.
4. Record 2 facts per answer. Did it name your company? Did it link your site?
5. Note who it names instead. Also note the sites it cites, such as Yelp or Expertise.com.

Bing Webmaster Tools adds a free check for Microsoft. Its AI Performance report shows Total Citations and Average Cited Pages across Copilot and Bing AI summaries. It also shows grounding queries, the phrases AI used to find your pages. The report is in public preview since February 10, 2026 (Bing Webmaster Blog).

Paid trackers, such as Profound, Peec AI and OtterlyAI, run prompts for you each day. For a 50 to 500 door company, a monthly manual check is often enough to start.

A simple monthly AI scorecard

A monthly scorecard puts the 3 signals on one page. Fill it in on the same day each month.

Metric	Source	Last month	This month
AI visits (AI Assistant + custom AI channel)	GA4
Landlord leads with utm_source=chatgpt.com	CRM
AI crawler visits to landlord pages	Cloudflare or Ahrefs
Landlords who said “ChatGPT” or another AI	Landlord form, first call
Answers that name you (for example, 4 of 40)	Manual prompt check
Answers that link your site	Manual prompt check
Copilot citations	Bing Webmaster Tools

How we track AI traffic on Citata.ai

We use the same 3 signals on Citata.ai. Our setup is small and cheap.

• Cloudflare Worker. Our site runs on a Cloudflare Worker. It checks each page request against a list of AI bots and AI referrers. It writes each AI hit to Workers Analytics Engine, with the source, the page and the status.
• Ahrefs Web Analytics. It is free for sites with verified ownership and uses no cookies (Ahrefs). It shows which AI chatbots send visits.
• “How did you hear about us.” Our audit request email has this line. The buyer fills it in.

Our baseline is honest. On 2026-10-18 we asked 20 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, 2 runs each. AI named Citata.ai in 0 of 108 non-brand answers (our data, 2026-10). It also mixed us up with Citate.ai. We will measure again with the same prompts and report the result.

If you want this check done for you, we run a free AI visibility audit. It covers 20 landlord questions on 4 AI engines and gives you your top 5 fixes.