Open GA4, look for the visits AI platforms are sending you, and you will find some of them. Since 13 May 2026 there has been an AI Assistants row in your acquisition reports. It misses AI traffic in three ways.
- Many AI visits arrive with no referrer. The referrer is the small piece of information a click carries to say which site the visitor just left. AI apps and their built-in browsers often strip it out. With nothing to read, GA4 files the visit under Direct, next to people who typed your address by hand.
- Assistants Google has not listed go to Referral. Google recognises a fixed set of AI platforms. Anything outside that set lands in Referral, buried among the blogs and directories that link to you.
- Google’s own AI never reaches the row. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted as Organic Search, which Google’s documentation states directly. Part of your AI traffic is already sitting in a report you have read for years, with nothing to mark it out.
What GA4 already counts for you
Go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and look for the AI Assistants row. Google’s default channel group documentation explains how it works. GA4 keeps a list of AI assistants. When a visit arrives from one of them, GA4 sets the medium to ai-assistant and the campaign to (ai-assistant). Nothing for you to configure but the platforms like Claude and Perplexity are not on the list. So that’s why we need setup custom configuration.
3 Things the Native Channel Misses
Perplexity and Claude are not on Google’s list. So when someone clicks through from Perplexity, GA4 does not know it came from an AI tool. It just sees a link from another website and drops it into Referral, the same bucket as every blog and directory that mentions you.
Google’s own AI is left out on purpose. AI Overviews and AI Mode are the AI answers that show up inside Google search results. Clicks from them do not go into the AI Assistants row and Google counts them as normal Google organic search.
Some visits arrive with no clue where they came from. Normally a click passes along a small note saying which site the visitor just left. GA4 reads that note to work out where to file the visit. AI apps often do not send one. Neither does someone who reads your name in an answer, then opens a browser and types it in. GA4 has nothing to go on, so it files them under Direct. Nothing you set up will fix this.
One more thing before we get to the setup. GA4 will not let you edit its built-in channels, so you cannot just add Perplexity to the AI Assistants row yourself. Making your own channel group is the only way in.
Do Not Copy Google’s Own Regex
Google gives an example pattern for AI assistants in its custom channel groups documentation. Here it is, exactly as written:
^.*ai|.*\.openai.*|.*chatgpt.*|.*gemini.*|.*gpt.*|.*copilot.*|.*perplexity.*|.*google.*bard.*|.*bard.*google.*|.*bard.*|.*.*gemini.*google.*$
Look at the very first part, ^.*ai. It tells GA4 to grab any source with the letters “a” and “i” sitting next to each other, anywhere in the name. Not the word “AI”. Just those two letters.
Think about how many website names contain them. Mail. Retail. Air. Chair. Detail. So mail.google.com gets counted as AI traffic. So does a shop with “retail” in its address, and a long list of sites that have nothing to do with AI at all.
The .*bard.* part does the same thing on a smaller scale, catching any name with “bard” inside it. The pattern also repeats gemini and bard several times over, which adds nothing.
The Regex to Use Instead
This version lists real domains one by one, so it only matches what you actually mean. It covers the platforms Google’s native channel handles; plus, the ones it leaves out:
.*(chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|claude\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|m365\.cloud\.microsoft|deepseek\.com|grok\.com|x\.ai|meta\.ai|you\.com|poe\.com|mistral\.ai|phind\.com).*
Apply it to Source, not Medium. Source is the website a visit came from. Medium is the type of link it was, and AI referrals all share the same medium as ordinary links, so a rule built on Medium would drag in every blog and directory that mentions you.
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Set It Up in GA4
You need Editor access or higher on the property. The whole setup will takes about 30 minutes.
- In Admin, under Data display, open Channel groups.
- Click Create new channel group.
- Click Add new channel and name it AI Assistants (All). Add a condition where Source matches regex and paste the pattern above.
- Save the channel. Then click Reorder and drag your new channel so it sits above Referral.
- Click Save group.
That reordering step is the one people skip, and it is the reason their channel sits at zero. GA4 works down the list of channels from the top and puts each visit in the first one it fits. Referral is a wide net, and AI visits fit it. So if Referral is above your channel, it takes them all before your rule ever gets a turn. Google’s documentation says this outright.
Google’s own instructions go a step further and suggest putting the AI channel above Organic Search as well. Think twice before you do. Your pattern only looks for specific assistant domains, so it should never clash with Google or Bing anyway. Moving it that high only creates a problem later, on the day you loosen the pattern and forget you did.
To see the results, go to Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and change the primary dimension at the top of the table to your new channel group.
A standard GA4 property lets you make two custom channel groups on top of the built-in one, with up to 50 channels inside each. GA4 360 gives you 5.
Remember plenty of AI-driven visits never carry any sign of where they came from, so they land in Direct. Someone reads about you in a ChatGPT answer, then types your brand name into a browser. So, nothing will appear in the channel you just built.
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