ChatGPT Traffic Drop Appears To Be A Tracking Problem via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

The number of ChatGPT-attributed sessions in Google Analytics 4 fell by 22% to 57%, for sites tracked by Graphite with meaningful traffic in the AI Assistant channel, starting Oct. 9, stated Graphite CEO Ethan Smith in his LinkedIn post. Smith estimates this represents an approximate 45% fall from the previous baseline. LLM Pulse reported that, relative to the same days in the last two weeks, sessions from ChatGPT on the sites LLM Pulse has been monitoring were approximately 46% less during Oct. 9–11. Total traffic on those sites remained relatively constant over the same period. Smith says that ChatGPT started opening links in the answer text without the utm_source=chatgpt.com tag or a referrer, therefore visits from these links can appear as Direct in GA4.