AI assistant referral

How an assistant sends a reader

When an AI assistant answers with sources, it shows links. A person who clicks one arrives on your site like any other referral, and the browser usually passes the assistant's address as the referrer: chatgpt.com, claude.ai, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com.

That only works when a referrer is passed. Desktop apps and mobile apps often open links without one, so some of those readers can't be told apart from someone who typed your address. They land in Direct.

How Vireo recognises them

Vireo matches the referrer's host against a list of assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok, Mistral, Poe, You.com, Phind and Meta AI. The patterns are anchored, so a site that merely contains "chatgpt" in its name doesn't match, and they cover the older domains several assistants have moved from, such as chat.openai.com and bard.google.com.

The matching runs when the report is read, against the referrers already stored. Visits recorded before Vireo knew about an assistant are grouped correctly too. A developer can add or change assistants with the vireo_ai_sources filter.

These visits appear as AI assistants in Top referrers, and the Source filter narrows every total to them.

Readers against requests

A referral count on its own says little. The AI assistants card puts it next to how many pages the same companies' crawlers requested over the same days, and shows crawler requests per reader sent. On most sites the crawlers take far more than the assistants send back, and that ratio is the useful number when deciding which AI crawlers to allow.

Pitfalls

Assistants add their own tags to some links, such as utm_source=chatgpt.com. The free plugin drops the query string and counts the visit under its referrer. Vireo Pro reports UTM tags as campaigns, so the same visit can show in both places.

A low number isn't proof that assistants ignore you. App traffic without a referrer is counted as Direct, so treat the figure as a floor.