Features / AI Referrer Tracking
Is ChatGPT sending
traffic to your site?
AI tools are becoming a meaningful source of visitors — and most analytics miss them entirely. Wiley watches for traffic arriving from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot, then tells you what you can do to grow or protect that channel.
Why most analytics miss AI traffic
The site a visitor came from. When someone clicks a link to reach your site, the site they came from is the "referrer." Analytics tools use referrer data to show you where your traffic originates — but AI tools often don't pass this information, so those visits get misclassified or missed entirely.
Most analytics tools sort traffic by where visitors came from. The problem: AI tools don't always pass along that source information when they send someone your way. When they don't, that visit shows up as "direct" — as if the person typed your URL from memory. The traffic is real. It's just invisible.
Wiley looks specifically for AI tool domains and patterns that standard tools don't catch. When a visitor arrives from an AI assistant, Wiley knows — and it tells you which tool, which page they landed on, and what to do about it.
AI sources Wiley watches
The biggest AI assistant by traffic. When someone asks ChatGPT about your topic and clicks a source, Wiley captures it.
The AI search engine. Perplexity links to its sources prominently — if your site is in its index, you may already be getting visitors from it.
Anthropic's assistant. Claude increasingly links to sources in its answers and is a growing referral channel for content-rich sites.
Google's AI assistant and AI Overviews in search. An emerging traffic source as Google weaves AI deeper into its results pages.
Microsoft's AI assistant, built into Windows and Edge. Draws from Bing's index, which has substantial overlap with Google.
An AI-native search engine that links to sources by default. Smaller than the big players but growing, especially among privacy-minded users.
Wiley's source list is updated as new AI tools gain real traffic share. You don't configure anything — it just shows up in your nudge when it happens.
What Wiley does when it spots AI traffic
Knowing that an AI tool is sending visitors is only useful if you know what to do with it. When Wiley spots AI traffic, it explains which pages are being referenced, which tools are driving visits, and what specific changes would help you show up more often.
Over the last 30 days, 47 visitors arrived from perplexity.ai. That's up from 12 the month before. They're landing almost entirely on your /about page and your /faq page — the two places on your site with the most clear, factual writing.
Perplexity tends to cite pages that answer a specific question cleanly and directly. The pattern here suggests it's pulling your FAQ as a reference for questions about your service. Adding two or three more well-structured questions — ones that match what people actually search — would give Perplexity more to work with.
It's also worth adding structured data to those pages if you haven't already. When a page is marked up clearly, AI tools can cite it with more confidence.
From Wiley
Common questions
Do I need the tracking script for AI referrer detection?
Yes. AI referrer tracking is part of Wiley's visitor tracking layer, which requires the script. The script captures where every visit came from — including visits from AI tools. This is available on all paid plans. The free plan is crawl-based only.
What if an AI tool sends traffic but doesn't show a visible citation?
That's common. Many AI assistants use content to inform their answers without surfacing a link to the user. The visitor still arrives at your site through a click — Wiley captures that regardless of whether a source was shown publicly.
How do I make my site show up more in AI answers?
Wiley's coaching covers this. The short version: clearly structured pages with specific answers tend to get cited more than broad, general ones. Structured data (JSON-LD) helps AI tools extract and attribute information confidently. FAQ-style content does especially well. Wiley will flag the specific opportunities on your site.
How is this different from Google Search Console?
Search Console only shows traffic from Google. It has no visibility into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or any non-Google AI tool. Wiley fills that gap — and because it combines this with everything else it knows about your site, it can suggest specific changes to improve your presence in AI results.
Find out if AI tools
are already sending you visitors.
Requires tracking script on paid plans. 7-day free trial, cancel anytime.