The six sources
The Where visitors come from card on the Overview groups every visit by how the person arrived:
- Direct: no referrer at all. They typed the address, used a bookmark, or came from an app or email client that doesn’t pass one on. Clicks from one page of your own site to another count here too: your own hosts, connected sites, headless origins, localhost and bare IP addresses are never listed as referrers.
- Search: search engines, including visits from the Google app on Android, shown as “Google app”.
- AI assistants: links followed from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and other assistants. See AI assistants and crawlers.
- Social: social networks and communities, including Hacker News, Product Hunt, Slack, Discord and Mastodon instances. Common Android apps such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack and Telegram show by name.
- Email: visits from links tagged
utm_medium=emailorutm_medium=newsletter, listed by theirutm_source. These links usually arrive with no referrer, so untagged they count as Direct. - Other sites: every other site that linked to you.
Each group’s total counts every site in the range, not only the ones listed. When a group has more sites than fit, the card says “None of these made the top ten. Filter by this source to list them.”
Filter by source
The Source filter at the top of the page narrows every number on the page to one group. Set it to Search to see how many pageviews and visitors search sent, and Where visitors come from fills with the ten search engines that sent the most.
One referrer’s screen
Click a referrer’s name to see its own screen: “Pageviews in range” and “Visitors in range”, a daily chart of the traffic it sent, and “Posts it sent people to”, with the pageviews on each post from that referrer. “← Overview” goes back.
Referrer spam
Vireo ships with a list of known referrer-spam hosts. Hits from them never reach the totals; they’re counted under Referrer spam in the bot panel. See Bot filtering.
A referrer that isn’t on the list but shows no engagement is tagged “suspected junk” in Where visitors come from: every visit viewed one page, none landed on a post, over a burst of days. Administrators see a “Block this referrer” button beside the tag. Until you decide, a suspect stays in the list but is left out of What changed and the weekly highlights.
Blocking adds the host to the “Blocked hosts” list under Settings, Tracking. Its visits are filtered like bots from then on and earlier rows are hidden from reports. Nothing is deleted, and removing the line from the list unblocks it.
Campaigns
Links tagged with utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign are reported by campaign in Vireo Pro. The free plugin counts those visits under the referrer they came from.
Why Direct can be large
Many apps and some browsers strip the referrer, and so do links in PDFs and most email clients. Those visits can only be counted as Direct. Search engines that hide the search itself still pass their own name, so they land in Search. To see what people searched for, connect Search Console.