Traffic sources

Every visit gets categorized into one of four traffic sources. The breakdown shows up as a doughnut chart on your Summary page and as a detailed table on Reports → Traffic Sources.

The four buckets

• Direct — the visitor arrived without a referrer. They typed your URL, clicked a bookmark, opened your link from a chat app or email client (which strips referrers), or arrived via a redirect that dropped the referrer header.
• Search — the referrer is a search engine: Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex, Ecosia, Qwant. We also try to extract the search keyword (most engines now hide it for privacy, so this is mostly empty).
• AI — the referrer is an AI assistant: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, character.ai, you.com, phind, Kagi, Mistral, Hugging Face, Poe, Meta AI. This category is unique to HitCounters. Most analytics tools bury AI referrers under "Other".
• Referral — any other website. The actual referring domain is in the visitor activity log and the Top Referrers report.

Why AI traffic matters

AI assistants are the new search engines. When ChatGPT recommends a tool or Perplexity cites a blog post, those clicks are real customers. Tracking them separately tells you which AI engines actually drive traffic to your content — useful for adjusting how you structure articles, what FAQs you include, etc.

Which AI assistants do we detect?

The current list (we update it regularly):

chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, openai.com, claude.ai, anthropic.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, bard.google.com, aistudio.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, bing.com/chat, character.ai, you.com, phind.com, kagi.com, mistral.ai, huggingface.co, poe.com, meta.ai

Reports → Campaigns tab

If you tag your URLs with UTM parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign), the Campaigns tab on Reports shows them grouped — sessions, engaged visits, and avg duration per campaign. Use our free UTM builder to generate clean tagged URLs.

Top Referrers

The Came From / Top Referrers report on the Reports page shows the actual referring domains, ranked by sessions. Click any row to see which pages on your site they sent visitors to.

Search keywords

Modern search engines hide keyword data from referrer URLs ("not provided" / "(secure-search)"). We surface what we can extract from older referrer formats and from the few engines that still leak it. For real keyword data, integrate Google Search Console (planned).