Is ChatGPT sending you customers? Here's where to look

Published 6 October 2026 · 4 min read

Google Analytics already shows whether ChatGPT sends visits to your shop. Where to find them, and what a small number or a zero really tells you.

A buyer asks ChatGPT where to buy trail running shoes. The answer recommends three shops, each with a link. If one of them is yours and the buyer taps it, that visit lands in your Google Analytics like any other.

So you can see today, without any new tool, whether ChatGPT already sends people your way. It takes about five minutes.

Reading the number takes longer, because it shows only half the picture. The half it leaves out is usually the half that matters.

How visits from ChatGPT show up

OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it shows. A UTM tag is a short label at the end of a web address that tells your analytics where a visitor came from. Because of it, Google Analytics 4 usually files these visits as chatgpt.com / referral: the source is ChatGPT, and the visitor arrived by following a link.

Not every visit carries the label. Someone using the ChatGPT app on a phone can arrive with no record of where they came from. Then the visit is counted as direct traffic, as if they had typed your address by hand. So the number you find is a floor, not the full count.

Find them in Google Analytics, step by step

1. 1 Open Google Analytics 4 and choose your shop's property.
2. 2 In the menu on the left, go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. If you can't find it, type “Traffic acquisition” into the search bar at the top.
3. 3 In the top right, set the dates to the last 90 days, so that even a handful of visits has a chance to show.
4. 4 The first column of the table shows channel groups at first. Click the small arrow in its heading and choose Session source / medium.
5. 5 In the search box just above the table, type chatgpt and press Enter. Look at every row that contains it, whatever comes after the slash.
6. 6 Do the same for perplexity, gemini and copilot.
7. 7 Write down the sessions in each row. If your shop sends its sales to Analytics, the same row also shows purchases and revenue.

OpenAI documents the tag for ChatGPT only. For the other assistants, treat whatever shows up under their names as a rough view, not a count.

What a small number or a zero tells you

A few visits a month from chatgpt.com means ChatGPT recommended your shop in some answers and some buyers clicked. That is worth knowing. It is also all this report can tell you.

Those visits come only from answers where two things happened: ChatGPT recommended you, and the buyer clicked. A buyer who read your name and then looked you up on Google counts as Google. A buyer who read the answer and picked another shop doesn't appear at all.

The answers that recommended a rival instead of you leave no trace in your analytics. Nobody arrives, so nothing appears. You can't see how often buyers ask about what you sell, how often another shop is recommended, or why.

So a zero doesn't mean buyers aren't asking. They may be asking and being sent to other shops. And a steady trickle doesn't mean you're doing well. You might be recommended in one answer in ten while a competitor is recommended in most, and the report would look the same.

What to do with what you found

• Note the number with today's date and look again in a month. The direction it moves tells you more than the figure.
• Click the + next to the column heading and add Landing page + query string. You'll see which of your pages ChatGPT sent people to. Those are pages it read and was willing to link.
• If the row stays empty for months, check that your shop lets ChatGPT's search robot in at all. A setting in robots.txt or in your bot protection can shut it out without anyone noticing.
• Compare the ChatGPT row with your other sources over the same dates. A small row next to a large Google row is normal today; what you want to see is it growing.