Track ChatGPT Traffic in GA4 After the GPT-6 UTM Bug: What to Fix Now

If ChatGPT referrals in GA4 fell off a cliff around October 8 while Direct traffic jumped, you probably did not lose AI visibility. A reported tracking bug stripped the tags ChatGPT links normally carry. Here is what happened, and how to track ChatGPT traffic properly from here.

What happened to ChatGPT traffic on October 8?

OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 in ChatGPT on October 7, with Free and Go users getting it from October 8, according to Let’s Data Science and Bloomberg Government. Those reports describe an “Intelligent UI” in which answers can include charts, maps, buttons, forms and calculators. Paid tiers get GPT-6 Sol, and Free and Go get GPT-6 Luna.

The rollout came with a measurement problem. Search Engine Roundtable reported that from about 2 pm PT on October 8, links from ChatGPT stopped carrying utm_source=chatgpt.com and sent no referrer. With neither, GA4 had no way to know where those visits came from, so it counted them as Direct.

Adobe’s Cedric Huesler said OpenAI privately confirmed a bug and that a fix began around 2 am PT on October 15, Relevant Audience reported. OpenAI has made no public statement, and its release notes don’t mention the issue.

Those figures tell the story. The traffic did not vanish. Most of it was relabeled, showing up as Direct instead of ChatGPT.

How do you track ChatGPT traffic in GA4?

You don’t need new software. You need a few habits in the GA4 property you already have, plus a clear record of when tracking broke.

1. Annotate the gap. Mark October 8 through 15 in GA4 and in any report you share, so nobody compares that week with a normal one.
2. Find your ChatGPT sessions. In the Traffic acquisition report, look at session source and medium and filter for chatgpt.com. That is where tagged ChatGPT visits land when the tags work.
3. Group AI referrals together. Build a custom channel group, or a saved comparison, that collects ChatGPT and other AI assistants in one “AI referrals” bucket so they don’t get buried among other referrals.
4. Check Direct by landing page. Look for a jump in Direct visits to deep pages, such as one service page or one blog post, during October 8 to 15. We treat that as a hint of mislabeled AI visits.
5. Tie visits to leads. Make sure calls, form fills and bookings are tracked as key events, then compare AI-referred leads, not just sessions.
6. Recheck after the fix. Compare a full week after October 15 with a full week before October 8 to confirm tagged ChatGPT sessions came back.

If your property has never tracked calls or forms properly, start there. Our analytics and tracking setup can help with GA4 events, lead tracking and an AI channel grouping.

How much traffic does AI actually send?

Less than the headlines suggest, which is exactly why a tagging glitch can make it look like it collapsed. SE Ranking studied 101,574 sites using data from January 2025 to April 2026. AI referrals made up about 0.32% of website traffic, even after growing about 16x from 2024 to 2026. Organic search was 42.75% of all traffic, roughly 134 times all AI platforms combined.

With ChatGPT holding about three quarters of AI referrals in that study, one broken tag on ChatGPT links can wipe out most of what your AI channel shows. That is a reporting problem, not a demand problem.

What do Google and Bing now report about AI visibility?

Clicks are only part of the picture. People can see your business in an AI answer without clicking. Google and Bing now show some of that exposure, with real gaps.

Google Search Console

Since August 31, the AI performance reports have been live for all sites worldwide. They show impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. They show impressions only, with no clicks. On October 6, Google began notifying the top-level domain owner when a child property overrides the parent’s AI control setting.

The reports keep changing. On September 16, Google said AI position reporting “will evolve over time,” and on October 6 the performance report added multi-select country filters, Search Engine Roundtable reported. A new “Multimodal” search type added September 24 covers searches made with an image, such as Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads and Chrome’s “Search this image.” The queries dimension is not available for it.

On October 15, Google added more links to AI Mode and AI Overviews, per Search Engine Roundtable: more inline links, a top section that highlights one or two task links, news carousels that favor Preferred Sources, “Dive deeper” links with thumbnails and clickable creator names on videos. The AI reports still contain no click data.

“introduce additional metrics over time”

Google, on AI reporting in Search Console

Bing Webmaster Tools

On October 13, Bing added Topics Portfolio, a beta inside its AI Performance report. It groups the grounding queries your site appears for into topics, each with a Topic Size (citations across all sites), Sites Cited and number of Queries. It also lists “Opportunity Queries” where competitors are cited and you are not, over one-, two- or three-month windows, as Search Engine Journal also covered.

A simple monthly AI visibility scorecard

No single tool tells the whole story, so we recommend a short monthly scorecard that pulls from all of them. Keep it to one page.

• AI-referred sessions and leads in GA4, by platform
• AI impressions in Search Console for your main service pages
• Bing Opportunity Queries where a competitor is cited and you are not
• Five to ten real customer questions you check by hand in ChatGPT and AI Mode
• A log of known tracking breaks, starting with October 8 to 15

The hand checks matter because AI answers lean on sources beyond your website. Our post on which sources AI cites for local businesses covers where those citations come from, and our answer engine optimization service is built around them.

If your numbers still look wrong after the fix, ask us to take a look.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles