Traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude lands in Direct or generic
Referral in every default channel grouping — there is no “AI” channel out of the box. Pick the
assistants you care about and generate the exact GA4, Adobe, and dataLayer configuration to classify them.
100% client-side — nothing is sent anywhere · works offline
1 · Sources to classify
2 · GA4 — custom channel group
Admin → Data display → Channel groups → duplicate the default group.
Create a channel AI Assistants, move it above Organic Search and Referral.
Condition: Source — matches regex — paste:
GA4's channel-group regex is a full match — no anchors needed. For report search boxes / explorations use the anchored form:
4 · dataLayer — keep the attribution when the session goes Direct
Webviews and later sessions strip the referrer, so channel rules alone under-count.
This captures the AI referrer on first touch into a first-party event you can join later:
The honest caveat: a large share of AI-assisted discovery arrives with no referrer at all
(the assistant summarized you; the user typed the URL later). No referrer rule can see it. Triangulate with branded-search
and direct-traffic lift — method in the AI traffic guide.