Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Google Analytics has added a new AI assistant which lets you track traffic that comes from multiple different chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Google will now label traffic sources from different chatbots. This allows users to see which Chatbots they are performing well with and adjust their strategy accordingly.
Why this is important for Marketers
Chatbot traffic has grown exponentially in the last few years, although it still only accounts for around 3% of search engine traffic. This is still a huge number of people, regularly exceeding 5 billion searches monthly, and with many users now using it as their primary source of information online. For website owners, it is extremely important to understand how and why your traffic is coming to you, so you can maximise the potential traffic down the line.
For example, if your site were an information-based site, many users now use AI Overviews, ChatGPT, etc. for informational-based searches, 70% of users now use AI, while some search types, such as E-Commerce, still rely heavily on advertising and users entering websites as opposed to AI. For this information-based site, you would want to make sure you are structuring your content in a way that makes it visible for search engines to use your information. While the conversion rate is lower on AI tools compared to traditional search, being seen in Chatbots may still often lead to people coming to your website and converting.
What users should track in GA4?
Now that AI Assistant traffic is available in GA, there are a number of different ways you can track AI traffic in relation to your site. These help you to understand what content performs best on AI inside AI tools.
Different metrics to track include:
- Conversion rate from AI traffic – Making sure that your traffic is converting well is a priority. If the traffic coming from AI searches is low-quality, then you want to adjust your strategy for how you’re appearing in AI to target more high-value customers.
- Average Engagement Time – Related to the last point, once again linked to low-value traffic, if the traffic you’re receiving from AI is not engaging with your content for long periods of time, you want to try and adjust your strategy to target different kinds of traffic that offer more value
- Landing Pages from AI traffic – This is important because you can see which pages on your site are already performing well in AI and which ones aren’t. This allows you to analyse your content and draw conclusions on what types of content are working well in AI, helping you adjust future content plans to scale your site.
Tips for Improving AI Conversion
While making sure you know what content performs well in AI is important, and you are on top of tracking all the right data, knowing how to adjust your content to improve it for AI performance is also important. Here are a few quick tips to make sure your content is AI-ready. Ask yourself these questions. Does your content:
- Clearly answer specific questions
- Use concise headings and subheadings
- Includes factual and well-structured information
- Demonstrates expertise and authority
- Uses schema markup and clear hierarchies
These GA4 analytics metrics are a step forward for users in being able to understand and analyse their AI traffic, helping to stay on top of the ever-evolving industry and making the most of users’ changing search query habits.
