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How to Analyze GenAI Traffic and AI Overview Impact in Adobe Analytics?

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Hi everyone,
I’m working on a project to analyze the impact of Generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Google AI Overview) on our website traffic and engagement metrics using Adobe Analytics.
We recently lifted AI crawler restrictions in mid-July, allowing GenAI tools to index our website. Since then, we’ve noticed changes in traffic patterns, especially on informational pages.
However, since traffic from AI Overview is categorized as organic search by default, I’m looking for alternative methods or best practices to:

  • Identify which pages were impacted post-July (e.g., drop in page views or engagement).
  • Infer GenAI-driven traffic despite the lack of direct referrer data.
  • Compare pre- and post-crawler lift performance using Adobe Workspace.

Has anyone tackled similar challenges or found alternative ways to isolate GenAI impact in Adobe Analytics?
Any tips, segment logic, or dashboard examples would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

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6 Replies

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Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

There is a new release coming to Adobe Analytics in October that will let you analyze traffic from AI sources. If you read the release notes, it's the first item. Current Adobe Analytics release notes | Adobe Analytics

 

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In the meantime, if you identify the AI referrers you could build a segment for them. Eric Matisoff wrote a blog about this a little while ago, and he talks about some of the challenges with identifying AI traffic. Identifying Traffic from Generative AI / LLMs | Analytics Rockstar 🤘

 

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Thanks for sharing the update — I wasn’t aware of this upcoming release. It’s great to know Adobe is introducing a feature to help analyze AI-driven traffic.

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Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

In the meantime, even without the Adobe update, you can create a segment that looks at referring domains from known Gen AI websites.. while the Adobe one should be a more complete list, reviewing the "heavy hitters" is an easy check you can make today.

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Thanks for the tip — that’s a great interim solution! I’ve started setting up a segment using known GenAI referring domains.

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So the Referrer type dimension item, called "Conversational AI tools" has been released. It only groups traffic data based on the referrer. 
The following issues with classification still remain:

  • Traffic from ChatGPT (it’s tagged with utm_source=chatgpt.com, but it’s not classified as ChatGPT in Referrer Type/Referrer dimensions). From my observations, this traffic mostly comes from redirects within mobile AIchat applications, although a certain share from PCs also appears there somehow.

  • Traffic from “AI overviews” in browsers/search engines is still classified just as organic search.



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Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
So the Referrer type dimension item, called "Conversational AI tools" has been released. It only groups traffic data based on the referrer. 

This makes sense give this is part of the "referrer type" dimension... I wouldn't expect this to look at data beyond Referrers. I expect this is basically a reserved / standard classification rule.

 

To get data from the apps that don't include a referrer, and from other sources like AI Overviews will take additional effort, assuming they can even be identified.

 

There are so many different options, and some of the sources aren't doing us any favours...