AI referral traffic is website visits that arrive because someone clicked a link in an AI assistant's answer, such as a cited source in Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Google's AI surfaces. In analytics, it shows up as referrals from domains like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, or gemini.google.com.
For brands, AI referral traffic is one of the few directly measurable signals of AI visibility, since most of the value happens without a click. It tends to be lower in volume than traditional organic traffic but often higher in intent, because the user has already read a synthesized answer and is clicking through to go deeper. It captures only the clicked portion, not the larger zero-click exposure.