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AI this. AI that. The headlines aren’t stopping talking about how AI is killing SEO or taking jobs or whatever. But from a content performance perspective, artifical intelligence tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT and Microsoft do have have an impact on website search rankings. At times, even positively because they send traffic to your site. I see more and more traffic coming from them. So that leads me to think about what’s an SEO AI tool to measure what essentially is AI search traffic.
First things first, where does AI SEO traffic even show up? I looked at the WordPress stats to see. There we can see Search Engine traffic, which is all put under that category and includes the likes of Google, Bing, etc. But no AI platforms are listed.
Those AI platforms show up as separate referrals sites. In this example, you can see referral traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity. So I wondered do they also show up as referring domains – like all other inbound links? Do they count as backlinks? I was thinking, no, because none of those searches or prompts (aka queries in SEO) are public. Regardless, I hopped into Ubersuggest and checked if there was any backlinks from those two platforms.
Neither ChatGPT nor Perplexity showed as referring domains. So, they can and do send traffic to my site, but it doesn’t count as an onging backlink.
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SEO AI tool to measure referrals
One way to measure the impact is by looking at the referrals in your analytics platform. They certainly don’t give as much detail as a ranking report in Google Search Console, where we can see queries for a page, average position, impressions and clicks. None of those – except clicks – are passed along for AI SEO rankinngs.
The team over at Oban International outlined how to set up a way to measure it easily in Google Analytics as well.
Despite my dilligent research, I found no SEO AI tool that actually would do what I’m describing here or what can be done in Google Analytics. So for now it seems to see what impact these AI tools have on our site, we have to look at referral traffic and catch which referral is AI by knowing those platforms.