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Why Looking At Your “Organic Search” Traffic Volume In Google Analytics No Longer Tells The Whole Picture About Your Site Being Found On Search Engines

As I’ve been reviewing both my own website’s Google Analytics data, as well as that of my clients’ websites in recent months to see how much traffic they are getting from “organic search,” therefore, search engines, it’s become quite clear to me that an organization should no longer just rely on the results shown under the traffic acquisition and user acquisition reports, and specifically the results listed for defined traffic channel “organic search,” to assess how the site is faring from an SEO (search engine optimization standpoint).

Why? Because AI search engines are being used more and more by searchers and Google Analytics (GA4 Analytics) does not yet account for traffic coming from AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity and does not incorporate such traffic in the “organic search” volume total. Instead, that type of traffic shows up under the Google Analytics defined channel of “Referral” traffic.

How To See If Your Website Is Being Served Up In AI Search Engines

So, in addition to checking your “Organic Search” (search-engine) traffic volume, you will need to look at your referral traffic to see if any AI search engines are “referring” traffic to your site. You can do so by adding the “source/medium” dimension to your user or traffic acquisition report as shown in the print screens below related to our own website.

This is a print screen of the user acquisition report from Google Analytics for our SEO consulting firm, Results Communications and Research that shows the various marketing channels that are driving traffic to our website.

Click the “+” sign in the top left side of the report shown above to add another dimension to your Google Analytics report.

This is a print screen of the user acquisition report from Google Analytics for our SEO consulting firm, Results Communications and Research that shows the various marketing channels that are driving traffic to our website, but it also shows how to add dimensions to your user acquisition report so that you can see more detail about the various sub-marketing categories from which website traffic is coming from.
This is a print screen of a report run for our SEO consulting firm in Google Analytics to be able to see where all our website "referral" traffic is coming from, i.e., from what external websites are we receiving traffic.

Look thru the immediately-above report for referral traffic coming from AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Need Help Figuring Out How To Rank Better In AI Search Engines? Reach Out Today To Speak With An SEO Consultant.

Reach out today for a complimentary discussion about the type of online content your organization needs to regularly produce and publish to rank well on all search engines, not just AI-search ones!