AI assistant referrals are often visible through referrer domains or UTM fields, but they should be labeled as inferred or observed signals unless supported by stronger evidence.

What to capture

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Landing page URL and query string.

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Referrer URL and referrer domain.

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utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign.

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Language, country, device, viewport, and browser context.

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Event type, timestamp, and sample weight.

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Content identifier for Content Autopilot posts when available.

How to classify AI referrals

A visit from a domain such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, or gemini.google.com should be treated as an AI assistant referral signal.

That signal is useful for attribution, but it is not the same as verified crawler proof. Leadstore keeps assistant clicks and crawler verification separate so users understand what the data can support.

Why UTMs still matter

UTMs help separate paid campaigns, owned campaigns, partner links, content experiments, and organic assistant referrals. When a user publishes Content Autopilot content, UTMs can also help connect a content launch to downstream traffic.

Leadstore reporting model

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by_ai_tool for assistant referral domains.

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by_campaign for UTM campaign performance.

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by_channel for source and medium rollups.

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top_pages for page-level content performance.

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verified_bots for request-level crawler proof where available.

How this fits into the three Leadstore stages

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Stage 1, account + site added: users get the audit reward before any tag or key - four core channel scores, top fixes, readiness, generated llms.txt and llm-data.json, and the Leadstore Tag snippet to install.

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Stage 2, tag installed: users get the live telemetry reward with no key required - AI-crawler activity by engine, verified-bot counts, human traffic, top sources, top pages, devices and geography.

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Stage 3, key connected: users add answer tracking on top of the audit and telemetry layers - Visibility Score, SAIV, Brand Monitor, share of voice, citations, competitors and hallucination checks.

Next step

Use Leadstore Tag to capture the referrer, UTM, page, and device fields needed for assistant referral analytics.

Install Leadstore Tag →

Read about Content Autopilot →

Sources

Google Analytics Data API dimensions and metrics

Google Analytics IP address usage

Google Search Console Search Analytics API

Cloudflare HTTP request log fields

Cloudflare verified bots

PostHog autocapture and default properties