ChatGPT traffic may now look like direct traffic
Links from ChatGPT have stopped carrying the tracking tags that tell your analytics where visitors came from, so AI traffic can land in your reports as "direct". Separately, Google is feeding fake results to rank tracking tools.
Read the whole week in one goRank trackers are mostly fixed, but not fully
Why your traffic moved
After a site move, Google may refuse to index pages
One well known SEO says she is seeing more and more reports of sites struggling to get indexed (listed in Google at all) after moving to a new address. Marie Haynes thinks it comes down to overall site quality, and that a move may trigger a much stricter look at whether your pages offer anything original.
I think it's possible that a site migration triggers a much more strict evaluation of whether pages offer truly original and insightful information
Who this affects: Anyone planning to move their site to a new domain.
- Our take: improve weak pages before a move, not after.
Getting into AI answers
ChatGPT visits may be showing up as direct traffic
Links inside ChatGPT answers have stopped carrying UTM tags (the bits of a link that tell your analytics where a visitor came from), so ChatGPT visits can be counted as direct. Glenn Gabe says he still sees the tags, but only in the "More" section, not the main sources, and wonders if it is a bug.
I’ve already read that the traffic is being counter as direct now AND that they’re adding fewer citations with GPT-6
Who this affects: Anyone who tracks how much traffic comes from ChatGPT.
- Compare ChatGPT and direct traffic in analytics over the past week.
- Our take: note the date before blaming a real traffic drop.
Your rank tracker may be showing fake Google results
Google is quietly serving fake search results to automated scrapers, which includes the rank tracking tools many site owners pay for. A study of 27.5 million results pages found 8% were poisoned after September 13, peaking near 27% in late September, with tracked client sites dropping out of the top 10 on 58.6% of them.
If GSC hasn't displayed a major deviation, it is likely that it is a data anomaly rather than a change in your ranking
Who this affects: Anyone who watches rankings in a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.
- Check Search Console average position before reacting to a tracker drop.