Visits from AI assistants (Google Analytics)

What it does

Connect a project to Google Analytics 4 and Asheard reads your own Google Analytics data once a day, read-only, to show the visits AI assistants send to your site. It costs no credits.

• Sessions from AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral's Le Chat and others) in the latest 28 days, against the 28 days before: their share of all sessions, how many were engaged and how many key events they brought, next to the same for all sessions.
• By assistant: sessions, engaged share, engagement time and key events, and for the engines you track, how many of their answers in the last 30 days cited your site.
• Where AI assistants send visitors: the landing pages, which assistants sent them, and how often the AI answers we track cited and read each page.
• All channels: every session by Google Analytics' default channel group.
• On the AI crawlers page, each page's visits from AI assistants, next to how often AI crawlers requested it and the answers cited it.

Connecting

Open Google Analytics in the project's menu and click Connect Google Analytics. Sign in with a Google account that can see your site's Google Analytics 4 property (the Viewer role is enough) and allow access; if Google shows a box for Google Analytics, keep it ticked. Then choose the property. When exactly one property has a web stream on the project's site, it's chosen for you.

Managers and admins connect, choose the property and disconnect. Everyone who can see the project can see the page.

How visits from AI assistants are counted

A session counts when its source is an AI assistant's site or app, whatever channel Google Analytics gives it, and so does every session Google Analytics itself files under its AI Assistant channel. Google Analytics added that channel on 13 May 2026. It doesn't reclassify earlier sessions, it doesn't recognise every assistant, and links an assistant tags with its own source (ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to its links) can land in other channels such as Referral or Unassigned. That's why the numbers here can be higher than the AI Assistant channel in Google Analytics; the page says how many of the sessions that channel has.

An assistant that sends no referrer (some apps, a copied link) looks like Direct traffic, here and in Google Analytics: no tool can tell those visits apart.

AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode aren't counted as assistants: their clicks are Google Search clicks, in the Organic Search channel, and Google Analytics can't separate them from other Google results. To see how often your pages appear in them, import Google's AI report on the Google & Bing page; with Search Console connected, the Search Console page compares your CTR on days with and without an AI Overview.

What Asheard reads and keeps

Asheard asks Google for read-only access to your Google Analytics data and for your Google account's e-mail address, which the page shows so you know which account is connected. It can't change anything in Google Analytics. The access tokens are stored encrypted.

For the property you choose it reads: sessions, engaged sessions, key events and engagement time per day and default channel group; the same per day, source and medium for sessions from AI assistants; and for the latest 28 days, those sessions by landing page. To let you choose, it reads the names of the properties the account can see and their web streams' addresses. It reads nothing about individual visitors: no user or client IDs, no events.

It keeps the daily figures for up to 14 months, and the landing pages of the latest 28 days, replaced at every sync. The data is only used to show it to you in this project. It isn't shared, sold or used for anything else.

Asheard's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Disconnecting

Disconnect on the Google Analytics page removes the connection and deletes everything read from Google Analytics for the project. To remove Asheard from your Google account as well, use the third-party connections in your Google Account settings. When the same Google account is connected elsewhere in Asheard (another project, or Search Console), those connections keep working until you disconnect them too.

Good to know

• Days are in the property's time zone, and the page shows full days only, through yesterday. Google finishes processing a day within a day or two, so each sync reads the last days again.
• Key events are the events your property marks as key events (Google Analytics used to call them conversions).
• When Google signals is on, Google Analytics can hold back small numbers (data thresholds). The page says so when it happens.
• One property per project.
• If Google stops accepting the connection (access was removed in the Google account, or it expired after six months unused), the page asks you to connect again. Nothing is lost.