A growing share of people no longer start with a list of blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini a question like "pediatrician in Plano accepting new patients", read the answer, and click through to the one or two businesses it mentions.
If your site is one of them, that is some of the most valuable traffic you can get. The visitor has already been told you are a good fit. Until recently, though, most website owners had no way to see it. Those visits got lumped in with everything else.
AI assistants are now their own channel
OwnSites now sorts every visit to your site into channels: AI answer engines, organic search, social, referral and direct. When someone clicks through from an AI assistant, it is counted under AI and named by engine. We recognise ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Google's AI Mode, Meta AI, Grok, You.com, Phind and DuckDuckGo's AI chat.
You will find it in three places:
- Your site's Analytics page, next to search and social.
- The provider app on your phone, as a "From AI assistants" card with the total, its share of all visits, and a bar for each engine.
- The admin dashboard, for teams that manage several sites.
Why the number is a floor, not a ceiling
We would rather tell you this up front. Some AI apps open links in a way that hides where the visitor came from, so the click arrives looking like someone typed your address directly. Those visits are counted as Direct. The AI number you see is the visits we know came from an assistant. The real figure can only be higher.
Referrers also only started being recorded properly on October 12, 2026. If you look at a period that starts earlier, the report says so rather than showing a misleading zero.
What to do with the number
Watching the AI channel over a few weeks tells you whether the work you put into your site is reaching people who search this way. If it stays at zero, the usual cause is that assistants do not have clear facts about your business to quote. That is the subject of our next post: the facts AI assistants quote about your business.
We will not promise that any assistant will recommend you. Nobody honest can. What we can do is make your site easy for them to read, and show you plainly when it works.