Guide

Is ChatGPT Sending You Customers? Here Is How to Find Out

People are finding local businesses through ChatGPT now. Most owners have no idea whether it is happening to them. Here is how to check, in about ten minutes, using free tools you already have.

By Karan
  • AI Search
  • GEO
  • Analytics

You probably cannot answer this question right now. Almost nobody can, and it is not your fault. Until recently, visits from ChatGPT landed in your website reports under vague labels like “Direct” or “Referral”, mixed in with everything else. The traffic was there. It just had no name.

That matters more than it used to. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 people, 45% said they had used an AI tool to get a recommendation for a local business. A year earlier, that number was 6%.

So the question is no longer whether people do this. It is whether they are doing it for your business, and whether you would notice.

Here is how to check. You need about ten minutes and two free tools you almost certainly already have.

First, understand what you are looking for

There are two different things happening, and people mix them up constantly.

Someone asks ChatGPT a question, and clicks a link to your site. That is a visit. It shows up in your website reports.

Someone asks Google something, and your business appears inside the AI summary at the top. That is different, and Google treats it differently, which we will come back to.

Keep those two apart in your head. Most of the confusion around this topic comes from blending them together.

Step 1: Check the AI Assistant channel in Google Analytics

In May 2026, Google Analytics quietly added a new group called AI Assistant. It became available to everyone on 7 June 2026. Google describes it as the channel for people who “arrive at your site from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot, or Grok.”

Before this existed, those visits were scattered across other labels. Now they have their own line.

To find it:

  1. Open Google Analytics and choose your website.
  2. In the left menu, click Reports.
  3. Click Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition.
  4. Look down the first column for AI Assistant.

If you see it, that number is real people arriving from an AI chatbot. If the row is not there at all, it means nobody has arrived that way in the period you are looking at.

One thing that catches people out: this is not backdated. Google only started labelling these visits from May 2026 onward. Anything before that is still sitting in the old buckets, and it will stay there. So do not panic if your history looks empty.

Step 2: Know the trap, because this one fools professionals

Here is the part almost nobody explains properly.

When your business appears in Google’s AI Overview (the AI summary at the top of Google results) and somebody clicks through to you, that visit does not appear under AI Assistant. Google counts it as ordinary search traffic. Their own definition of the Organic Search channel says it includes “Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.”

So your AI Assistant number is not “all my AI traffic.” It is a narrower thing: people coming from chatbots. The Google AI summaries are folded in with your normal Google visits and cannot be separated out.

If someone tells you they can show you exactly how much traffic your AI Overviews send you, they are guessing.

Step 3: Catch the ones Google misses

Google’s AI Assistant list covers ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot and Grok. Two popular tools are missing from it: Perplexity and Claude.

If you want those counted too, you can build your own group. This takes a few minutes and is the one slightly fiddly part of this guide.

  1. In Google Analytics, click the gear icon (Admin) in the bottom left.
  2. Under Data display, click Channel groups.
  3. Click Create new channel group and give it a name like “AI tools”.
  4. Add a rule where Source matches regex, and paste this in:

chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|claude\.ai|copilot\.microsoft\.com|you\.com|poe\.com|meta\.ai

Those backslashes are not typos. Google’s matching treats a plain full stop as “any character”, so the backslash tells it you mean an actual dot. Leave them in.

If that feels like too much, skip it. The built-in AI Assistant channel is enough to answer the basic question.

Step 4: Check Search Console for the Google side

Google Search Console now has a report for this, and it finished rolling out to every website on 31 August 2026.

  1. Open Search Console and pick your site.
  2. In the left menu, look under Performance for the generative AI report.

Be clear about what it does and does not tell you. It shows impressions only: how many times your links were shown inside AI Overviews or AI Mode. It does not show clicks, click-through rate, position, or which questions triggered it. Those clicks are still counted, but only inside your main Search performance numbers, mixed in with everything else.

So this report answers “am I showing up at all”, not “what is it earning me”. That is still worth knowing. Showing up is the part you can influence.

What if the numbers are basically zero?

For most small local businesses right now, these numbers are small. That is normal and not a reason to panic.

But if they are flat zero and staying that way, there are usually two causes, and both are fixable.

Your website needs JavaScript to show its words. The crawlers behind these AI tools do not run JavaScript. If your text only appears after scripts load, they see an empty page. You can check in ten seconds: open your page, right-click, choose “View page source”, and search that raw text for a sentence from your page. If your own words are not there, that is your answer. We explained this in more detail here.

You are blocking the wrong robots. Plenty of businesses blocked every AI crawler after reading a scary headline, not realising that some of those crawlers are the ones that put you in the answers. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. The same post above covers which ones to allow and why.

What to actually do with this

Check it once a month. Not daily. These numbers move slowly and staring at them will only annoy you.

What you are watching for is direction, not size. A business going from zero to a handful of AI visits a month is on the right path. A business stuck at zero for six months while its competitors get named in answers has a technical problem worth fixing.

And do not let anyone sell you a guaranteed position inside an AI answer. Nobody can promise that. What can be done is making sure the tools can read your site, that your business details match everywhere they appear, and that your pages actually answer the questions people ask. That is the whole job.

If you would like a straight answer about where your own site stands, our free website health check covers the technical half of this, or you can just ask us.

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