Visitors
A visitor, in Trakkr, is a session whose Google Analytics sessionSource matches a known AI tool: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, You.com, Phind or Poe. Visitors puts those sessions in one view and joins them to landing pages, geography, devices, engagement, key events and revenue.
Open it when you want to know whether AI visibility is producing people on your site, and what those people do when they get there. It is also the signal behind the Visited stage in a page's journey.
Visitors needs a paid plan and a connected Google Analytics 4 property. It reads that property; it never adds a script to your site.
What Trakkr does that GA4 alone does not
The filtering is the product. Trakkr matches your property's sessionSource values against a maintained pattern set and groups the variants under one readable source, so chatgpt.com and openai.com both read as ChatGPT rather than sitting in two rows you have to remember to add up.
Matching is on token boundaries, not raw substrings. That is why llm.example.com counts as generic AI traffic and a referral from llmposts.com does not, and why poe does not claim every poetry site. When a provider ships a new hostname, the pattern set is updated for everyone.
Connect Google Analytics
You need a GA4 property and a Google account with access to it. On the Trakkr side you need edit rights on the brand; viewers can open the page but cannot connect anything.
- Open Visitors in the sidebar.
- Choose Connect Google Analytics and sign into Google.
- Pick the account, then the property that matches this brand.
Trakkr requests one Google scope, analytics.readonly. It can read reports and nothing else: it never writes back, never creates events and never changes property settings. Revoking access in Google's security panel drops the connection cleanly.
If Google shows "Access blocked" before the consent screen, a Google Workspace admin policy is stopping the app. Google never returns you to Trakkr in that case, so the connect screen looks untouched. The footnote under the connect button opens a dialog with instructions you can copy and send to your admin.
Each brand connects to its own property. Teammates who inherit access through team roles see the dashboard without connecting anything themselves.
Reading the dashboard
Two tabs share the same date range, source filter and settings. The range picker offers 7D, 14D, 30D or a custom window, with an optional comparison against the previous period.
Reports are cached for up to four hours. The header shows how fresh the current report is, and the refresh control requests a new one.
Traffic tab
Hero stats adapt to what your property can report. With no revenue data they read AI Visitors, Conversion Events, Engagement and average session or engagement time; with revenue they lead on Revenue and Visitor Value instead. Below that:
- A source filter. Click a source to isolate it; the whole page follows.
- A trend chart, switchable between totals and a stacked breakdown by source.
- Top landing pages ranked by AI sessions, and a geography panel (replaced by a revenue breakdown when your property reports revenue by source).
- Devices and sources, and a feed of recent AI visitors.
Conversions tab
The same sessions, viewed through what people did. It reads the key events already configured in your GA4 property, so if you have none, this tab tells you to set them up rather than showing zeros.
- Pin the events you care about so they sit in a watch strip at the top.
- A conversion trend chart, with a revenue mode and a CSV export.
- A by-source breakdown, so you can compare per-source conversion rate rather than raw volume.
- A funnel you build from your own events, computed as a real sequential GA4 funnel.
If your property does not carry revenue, you can set a value per event and Trakkr labels the result Estimated rather than Tracked. The badge stays visible so an assumed number never reads as a measured one.
Traffic settings
The gear in the header opens Traffic settings. Everything here changes what the numbers mean for this brand and persists across sessions.
| Section | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Connection | The connected property and account, changing to a different property, disconnecting |
| Hostnames | Which of the property's hostnames count. Trakkr lists every hostname the property reported in the last 28 days with its session count. Untick one and it leaves every AI figure, including the totals, so the AI share stays honest. Up to 20 exclusions. |
| AI sources | Which platforms count as AI traffic, plus custom patterns for something the list cannot know about, such as an internal AI gateway. Up to 10 custom patterns, and at least one source stays on. |
When a filter is active the header says so and links back into the settings, so a filtered number never presents itself as the full property.
What the numbers cannot tell you
The undercount is real, and Trakkr does not paper over it.
- Referrers go missing. Some AI clients open links in a way that drops the referrer. GA4 files those as Direct, and Trakkr leaves them there rather than guessing.
- Query parameters get stripped. Tagging your own links does not survive an AI tool rewriting the URL, so UTMs are not a way to identify AI as the source.
- Journeys are multi-step. Someone can arrive from Perplexity, leave, come back direct and convert. A session-source view cannot prove the first visit caused the later conversion.
- Google adjusts results. Sampling, privacy thresholds and high-cardinality grouping can all change a figure. Trakkr shows a notice on the report when Google says it did any of these.
Read the AI visitor total as a floor, not a measurement.
What to do with it
- Sort top pages by AI sessions. Those are the URLs AI is sending people to; treat them as landing pages and check they answer the implicit question.
- Compare a page's traffic with its citations. Treat the relationship as a lead worth checking, not proof of which answer produced each session.
- Compare conversion rate per source, not volume. A source sending five times the traffic at half the conversion rate is a different decision from one sending less and converting better.
- Cross-reference against Crawlers. Heavy crawler activity with no visitors means either AI is not surfacing the page or the answer gives readers no reason to click.
Common questions
Why is my number lower here than in GA4?
Usually because of a filter. Trakkr counts sessions whose sessionSource matches its AI pattern set on a token boundary, and any hostname you unticked in Traffic settings is excluded from the totals as well as the AI figures. A broad GA4 channel grouping counts a wider set. Check the hostname list and the active source list before assuming the numbers disagree.
Can I track AI visitors without Google Analytics?
Not through this page. Visitors reads GA4 sessions, engagement, key events and revenue, and the connect flow offers Google Analytics only. If you have no GA4 property, Crawlers still works, since it reads server-side requests instead.
Does Trakkr change anything in my GA4 property?
No. The connection uses the read-only Analytics scope. Trakkr never writes back, never creates events and never modifies the property.
How fresh is the data?
Reports are cached for up to four hours, and the header shows the age of the one you are looking at. Refresh requests a new report. GA4 also lags recent activity, so a click from a few minutes ago may not appear yet.
What happens to AI traffic that shows as Direct?
It stays Direct. Clients that strip the referrer leave nothing to attribute, and Trakkr will not relabel a session without evidence.
Can white-label clients see Visitors?
No. Client portal users are redirected away from every Traffic route. If a client needs the numbers, put them in a report or a shared page instead.