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Why GA4 alone can’t measure the real impact of AI SEO
If you’re relying on GA4 alone to measure the impact of AI SEO, you’re navigating with a broken compass.
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s a reasonable launch pad. But to understand how audiences discover, evaluate, and ultimately choose brands, measurement must move beyond the bounds of Google’s tooling.
SEO is a journey, not a destination. If you optimize only for attributable visits, large parts of that journey disappear from view.
Sessions are an outcome. They can’t contextualize consideration sets increasingly shaped by algorithms and AI well before a visit ever happens.
Don’t lose potential customers in the Bermuda Triangle of traditional SEO measurement. Harness the power of share of voice to steer user intent. Guide them to you by mapping your brand visibility in AI analytics.
Measuring AI visits with GA4
Links are becoming more prevalent in AI systems. Traffic is climbing. GA4 makes it easy to set up a custom report to track these sessions.
Create an exploration with “session source / medium” as the dimension and “sessions” as the metric. Then apply this regex filter on the referrer:
.*(chatgpt|openai|claude|gemini|bard|copilot|perplexity|you\.com|meta\.ai|grok|huggingface|deepseek|mistral|manus|alexaplus|edgeservices|poe).*Don’t be concerned if the output report is messy. That’s normal. Many AI systems send multiple sets of partial referral information. Some send none at all, so sessions appear as dark traffic.
This report is an easy first step. But don’t be fooled into thinking it can measure the impact of AI on your brand on its own.
The most viewed AI outputs – Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode – can’t be seen here. They are attributed to either “google / organic” or “(direct) / (none),” depending on how the user accessed Google.
With these limitations, looking only at GA4 traffic from generative AI is not a holistic enough data source to understand the reality of usage by your target audience and the impact on your brand.
Other data sources are needed.
Dig deeper: LLM optimization in 2026: Tracking, visibility, and what’s next for AI discovery
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools don’t separate AI queries
Bing Webmaster Tools technically reports Copilot data. But in the most Microsoftesque fashion, chat is combined with web metrics, obscuring the chat data and making the report ineffective for understanding the impact of generative AI.
This approach laid the foundation for Google Search Console to do the same. AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions and clicks are lumped in with Search, and the Gemini app is not included at all.
What you can do is look for more conversational-style queries using a Google Search Console regex, such as:
^(who|what|whats|when|where|wheres|why|how|which|should)\b|.*\b(benefits of|difference between|advantages|disadvantages|examples of|meaning of|guide to|vs|versus|compare|comparison|alternative|alternatives|types of|ways to|tips|pros|cons|worth it|best|top)\b.*But this is becoming less valuable as query fan-out becomes the standard, making synthetic queries indistinguishable from human queries while inflating impression numbers.
Worse, both GSC and BWT will become increasingly myopic as websites are bypassed by MCP connections or accessed directly by AI agents.
Again, other data sources are needed.
AI agent analytics with log files
Both Google and ChatGPT offer AI agents that can browse and, with permission, convert on a human’s behalf.
When an AI agent uses a text-based browser, it can’t be tracked by cookie-based analytics.
If the agent switches to a visual browser, it often accepts cookies, 78% of the time in my testing. But this creates problems in GA4:
- Odd engagement metrics. These are agent behaviors, not human ones.
- An unnatural resurgence of desktop traffic. Agents use desktop browsers exclusively.
- An uptick in Chrome. Agents run on Chromium.
On the plus side, agentic conversions are recorded, but they are attributed to direct traffic.
As a result, many SEOs are turning to bot logs, where AI agent requests can be identified. But those requests are not a headcount of humans sending agents to complete tasks.
When an agent renders a page in a visual browser, it fires multiple requests for every asset. CSS. JS. Images. Fonts. A bloated front end equals inflated request counts, making raw volume a vanity metric.
The insight lies not in totals, but in paths.
Follow the request flow through the site to the conversion success page. If there are plenty of requests but none reach the conversion path, you know the journey is broken.
Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform.
Dig deeper: How to segment traffic from LLMs in GA4
Traditional SEO reporting isn’t up to the task of tracking AI
To track the impact of AI SEO, you need to reassess your reporting.
Its benefits extend beyond the bounds of GA4, Google Search Console, and log file analysis, all of which assume the user reached your website directly from an AI surface. That’s not required for brand value.
Many SEO tools are now adding AI tracking, or are built entirely around it. The methodology is imperfect, with chat outcomes that are probabilistic, not deterministic. It’s similar to running focus groups.
With an unbiased sample, unbiased prompts, and regular testing, the resulting trends are valuable, even if any individual response is not. They reveal the set of brands an AI system associates with a given intent, forming a consensus view of a credible consideration set.
But AI search analytics tools are not all created equal.
Make sure your tool tracks not only website citations, but also in-chat brand mentions and citations of brand assets such as social media profiles, videos, map listings, and apps.
These are no less valuable than a website link. Recognizing this reflects SEO’s growth.
As an industry, we are returning to meaningful marketing KPIs like share of voice. Understanding brand visibility for relevant intents is what ultimately drives market share.
It’s not SEO’s job to optimize a website. It’s to build a well-known, top-rated, and trusted digital brand. That is the foundation of visibility across every organic surface.
