Definition

AI referral traffic is the visits that arrive from an assistant's interface, identifiable in analytics by referrer hosts such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. It is a fraction of the exposure, because most answers are read without a click.

Why it matters

It is worth tracking as confirmation, and dangerous as a target. Optimising for it pushes teams towards content that forces a click rather than content that gets cited.

How to measure it

Segment by referrer host in analytics and read it next to answer-side mention and citation data, not instead of it.