Most of your AI referrals are hiding in Direct
All the scrapers in the world don't help you if they never send people to your site. So you want your analytics to give you a good way to separate AI referral traffic. In ours that's a referrer category called AI, next to Search, Social and the others, and it's useful. But it's important to understand the limits.
How analytics spots an AI referral
An analytics product spots an AI referral in one of two ways. Either the link carries a tag, like utm_source=chatgpt.com, or the browser passes a referrer header saying the visitor came from claude.ai or perplexity.ai.
Only one client, ChatGPT, tags its links. Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot pass a referrer some of the time, and the mobile and desktop apps mostly don't. Everything that arrives without either lands in Direct.
Between people using the mobile and desktop apps, that group significantly outnumbers people using AI in a browser. So most of your AI referrals are hiding in Direct.
If Direct has been creeping up
If your Direct traffic has been creeping up for a year and nobody can explain it, some of that is AI. Direct is supposed to mean someone typed your address or clicked a bookmark. It has always been a catch-all, and it just got a lot bigger.
I think of Direct as the enemy. The whole point of a referrer report is to tell you where people came from, and Direct is the bucket where that answer goes to die. Every year another source gets stripped by a browser, a privacy setting, or an app that doesn't pass a referrer, and the bucket grows.