The AI traffic channel
The Referrers report groups your traffic into channels in a panel called Channel mix (subtitled Grouped by traffic type). Voris added an AI channel to that mix, so visits arriving from AI assistants are counted as their own channel instead of being lumped in with generic referral traffic.
[Screenshot: The Channel mix panel on the Referrers report, showing the AI channel]
What changed
The Channel mix groups traffic into five channels:
- Search — search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and the like).
- Social — social platforms (X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and so on).
- AI — AI assistants (the new one).
- Direct — visits with no referrer (someone typed your URL, or it came from an app).
- Referral — everything else: other sites that linked to you.
Before the AI channel existed, a person clicking through from ChatGPT or Perplexity was counted under Referral, the same bucket as any other website link. Now those visits land in AI instead, so you can see AI-assistant traffic as its own line.
Each channel shows its share of traffic, labelled as a percentage of traffic.
Which assistants count toward the AI channel
A visit counts toward AI when its referrer is one of the curated AI-assistant hosts:
| AI assistant | Referrer host(s) |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com |
| Perplexity | perplexity.ai |
| Gemini | gemini.google.com |
| Copilot | copilot.microsoft.com |
| Claude | claude.ai |
| Grok | grok.com |
| You | you.com |
Subdomains of these hosts (for example www.perplexity.ai) count too.
This is the same set of assistants used by the Visitors from AI section of the AI Visibility tab, so the two surfaces agree on what “an AI assistant” is.
A host that is not on this list still falls through to Referral, as before. Voris does not guess: only the curated AI hosts move into the AI channel.
Search engines do not count as AI
Search is checked before AI. So if a host is a known search engine, it stays in Search even though some search engines now have AI features. The AI channel is specifically for AI assistants people chat with, not AI-assisted search results.
A note on “Direct” traffic
AI assistants often strip the referrer when someone clicks a link. When that happens, there is nothing to identify the visit as coming from AI, so it lands in Direct rather than AI. This means the AI channel reflects the AI click-throughs we can clearly identify — it is a floor, not the full picture. We do not infer AI origin for referrer-less visits, because guessing would overstate the number.
Troubleshooting
The AI channel is missing from my Channel mix. It only appears when there is AI-assistant traffic in the selected period. With none, there is no AI slice to show. Try a wider period.
My AI traffic looks lower than I expected. Most likely the referrer was stripped — see the Direct note above. Only click-throughs that arrive with a recognised AI-assistant referrer are counted.
An AI tool I use is not listed. Only the curated assistants above are tracked. If a major assistant is missing, contact support and let us know.
Related
- The AI Visibility tab — a per-source breakdown of visitors from AI, with conversion and landing pages.
- Understanding AI agents vs visitors from AI — the AI channel is about people, not crawlers.
- Understanding your dashboard — how referrers and Direct traffic work.