If your chatgpt.com referral numbers cratered in mid May, nothing actually left you.
Google Analytics added a new default channel group on May 14 called AI Assistant, and it now pulls recognized chatbot traffic (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) out of the referral bucket automatically. You should see chatgpt.com / ai-assistant largely replacing the earlier referral bucket. We’ve had a couple of clients on AI PPC jump to the conclusion that the ai-assistant traffic was a consequence of paid ads in ChatGPT. No such luck.
For anyone who’d been maintaining one of those custom regex channel groups to track AI traffic, this is good news, because GA4 finally does it for you and you can rip the old setup out.
The catch worth knowing is that the new channel only catches traffic that carries a referrer header.
Someone copies your link out of the ChatGPT app and pastes it, and that session lands in Direct, not AI Assistant. So your true AI traffic runs higher than the new number shows, and pinning down how much higher takes real attribution work, which is the kind of thing our AI SEO team does for clients all the time.
