Are you curious if you are getting ChatGPT traffic? I’m going to help you find out if and just how much ChatGPT traffic you are getting. With the recent announcement that ChatGPT is making links more visible in ChatGPT responses, this could be a good opportunity to increase your site’s visibility.
Let’s get to it.
ChatGPT Making it Easier to Connect with Sources
ChatGPT recently announced that they are making links more prominent in its chat responses. This is good news for website owners.
Here’s OpenAI’s announcement:
What will the links actually look like in responses? In the prompt response, the links will appear with the site name at the end of the section with blue clickable text in the following manner:
This makes it much easy for searchers to go to the source site and get more information. For site owners, this can help increase traffic. One important caveat here is that ChatGPT will not show links for all prompt responses.
Tracking Your Website Traffic from ChatGPT
ChatGPT does not offer any type of analytics natively yet. Don’t worry, though. It’s super easy to find out if you are getting any ChatGPT traffic. There are a couple of ways to go about this in Google Analytics.
Before getting started, make sure you have Google Analytics 4 installed on your website. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed yet, you can learn more here.
I’ll cover two ways to check your ChatGPT traffic in Google Analytics.
Analyzing Traffic Sources: Comparing ChatGPT to Others
To see how your traffic from ChatGPT is stacking up against other traffic sources such as Google, Bing, Facebook, and LinkedIn, use the Traffic acquisition report.
In Google Analytics, select Acquisition from the left menu to open the drop down. Select Traffic acquisition.
Scroll down to the table. Select the dropdown arrow next to Session primary channel group in the table. From the dropdown, select Session source.
Now the table will list the specific sources from which your traffic is coming. Search the table for chat.openai.com.
Now that you know you are getting some traffic from ChatGPT, the next step is to see where it is going to on your website.
Identifying Landing Pages from ChatGPT Traffic
To see the specific pages ChatGPT is driving traffic to, you’ll will want to look into the Landing pages report.
In Google Analytics, go to the menu on the left side of the screen and select Engagement. Then, from the dropdown, select Landing page.
We have to add a filter to the table to show the source traffic next to each landing page. To do this click the blue plus sign in the table next to Landing page.
This will open up a search box. In the box, enter session source. Select Session source from the displayed options.
Your Landing page table will now show a new column next to each landing page showing where its traffic came from.
To filter for traffic from ChatGPT, go to the search bar at the top of the table and enter openai.
The Session source column will now be filtered to your ChatGPT traffic and which Landing page is receiving the traffic. .
You can see for 2 of the pages, searchers are engaged for a good amount of time indicating high page relevance.
Now that you know you are getting traffic from ChatGPT and the pages that are getting the traffic, what is the next step? How can you optimize to increase this traffic?
Conclusion
Finding out which pages are getting ChatGPT traffic is the first step. The next step is to learn from these pages what might be attracting this traffic and to further optimize these pages. You can explore Generative Engine Optimization, recently published research on how to optimize content for increased visibility in ChatGPT.
As you make optimizations to these pages, keep monitoring for any changes in traffic patterns and user engagement in Google Analytics. this will help you monitor how well your optimizations are doing.
Keep in mind that ChatGPT currently does not provide analytics or insights regarding how frequently it displays links to your site in its prompts, nor does it reveal the specific questions people ask that result in your links being shown.
