ChatGPT traffic has now disappeared from analytics
The tracking tags that told your analytics a visitor came from ChatGPT are now gone from every link, one SEO reports.
ChatGPT links to your site no longer carry UTM parameters (the extra bits on the end of a link that tell your analytics where a visitor came from). Glenn Gabe reported this morning that he is not seeing them at all anymore.
That is a change from a day earlier. As we covered earlier, Gabe said the tags were still showing up for citations in the "More" section of the right hand sources panel, but had vanished from the answer itself and the core sources. Now he says they are gone everywhere.
What this does to your numbers
If your analytics cannot read where a click came from, it files the visit under direct traffic, the bucket for people who typed your address in or clicked a link with no label on it. So your ChatGPT numbers fall off a cliff while the actual visits keep arriving under a different name.
Gabe was blunt about what site owners will see in GA4, Google's free analytics tool.
Is it permanent
Nobody knows. Gabe thinks it is a bug rather than a decision, and says it does not help ChatGPT either. There has been no announcement from OpenAI, so treat this as unconfirmed and possibly temporary.
What to do
If you track where your visitors come from, do not panic at the drop and do not go hunting for a ranking problem that is not there. Open your analytics, look at your direct traffic for the last few days, and see if it climbed by roughly the amount your ChatGPT traffic fell. That is your answer.
If you want a rough count of AI visits while this lasts, check your server logs or your hosting analytics for referrer data, which sometimes still shows the source even when the link has no tags on it. Otherwise, make a note of the date this started so you can explain the gap in your reports later.
One more thing worth keeping in perspective. Nothing about your site changed. The traffic is still coming. Only the label on it went missing, and if Gabe is right that this is a bug, the label may come back as quickly as it went.
If you check GA4, you will see a big drop in ChatGPT visits based on this change.
Again, I think this is a bug... it doesn't help ChatGPT at all, and I hope we see this change back soon.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.