New: LLM Referral Data — See the AI Traffic Your Analytics Is Missing

Google Analytics shows you search traffic. It shows you social traffic. It shows you direct traffic. But when someone asks ChatGPT about your product, clicks the link in the response, and lands on your pricing page — what does your analytics show?

“Direct.” Or worse, nothing at all.

That changes today. WebDecoy now tracks LLM referral traffic across 11 AI platforms, giving you visibility into the fastest-growing acquisition channel on the web.

The Problem: A Blind Spot in Every Analytics Dashboard

AI search is eating traditional search. Gartner projects that traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026 as users shift to AI-powered alternatives. When your potential customers ask Perplexity “best bot detection tools” or tell Claude “compare WebDecoy vs Cloudflare bot management,” the AI cites your content and links to your site.

But here’s the problem: traditional analytics tools weren’t built for this. Most AI platforms strip or obscure referrer data. Google Analytics lumps AI-referred visits into “direct” or “(not set)” buckets. You’re flying blind on a traffic channel that’s growing exponentially.

Without LLM referral tracking, you can’t answer basic questions:

• How many visitors come from AI search vs traditional search?
• Which AI platforms drive the most traffic to your site?
• Which pages are AI platforms sending users to?
• Is your AI-referred traffic growing or declining?

How LLM Referral Tracking Works

WebDecoy’s detection script checks the document.referrer header on every page load and matches it against a maintained list of known AI platform domains. When a match is found, a lightweight beacon fires with the llm_referral flag.

Key technical details:

• Score: 0 — These are human visitors, not bots. LLM referrals carry no threat score because a real person clicked a link in an AI response.
• Source: llm_referral — Categorized separately from bot detections, scraper alerts, and other signals.
• Independent from bot detection — The referral check fires on its own, once per page load, regardless of other detection results.
• Lightweight — No performance impact. It’s a single referrer string comparison plus a minimal beacon.

This is an analytics feature, not a security one. You’re not blocking anything — you’re measuring a traffic source that was previously invisible.

11 AI Platforms Tracked

WebDecoy identifies referral traffic from every major AI platform:

As new AI search platforms emerge, the referrer list is updated — no action required on your end.

What You See in the Dashboard

The AI Referrals dashboard gives you four views:

Top Referring AI Platforms — Which AI services are sending you the most traffic. If Perplexity drives 3x more referrals than ChatGPT, your content strategy should account for that.

Traffic Trends Over Time — Are AI referrals growing week over week? This is the growth curve you need to track, especially as AI search adoption accelerates.

Top Landing Pages — Which pages receive the most AI-referred traffic. If your pricing page gets heavy Perplexity referrals but your docs don’t, that tells you what AI models are citing — and what they’re not.

Volume Breakdown by Platform — Proportional view across all tracked platforms. Useful for understanding which AI ecosystems your content performs best in.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

AI Search Is a New Acquisition Channel

When someone asks ChatGPT “how do I detect AI scrapers on my website” and ChatGPT links to your blog post, that’s a lead. It’s no different from a Google search click — except it’s been invisible until now.

Early data from publishers tracking AI referrals shows that AI-referred visitors often have higher engagement metrics than organic search visitors. The hypothesis is straightforward: a user who asked a specific question and got pointed to your content has strong intent.

Content Strategy Needs AI Search Data

If you’re investing in content marketing, you need to know whether AI platforms are citing your content. Without referral data, you’re optimizing for Google rankings alone while ignoring a channel that Similarweb data shows is growing double digits month over month across major AI search platforms.

LLM referral data tells you:

• Which content AI platforms prefer — Double down on formats and topics that get cited
• Which platforms matter for your audience — A developer tools company might see heavy Phind and Perplexity traffic while a consumer brand sees ChatGPT and Gemini
• Whether your AI visibility is improving — Track the impact of content changes on AI referral volume

The Full Picture: Bots + Referrals

WebDecoy already detects AI scrapers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and 20+ crawlers) and identifies RAG bots fetching content in real-time. LLM referral tracking completes the picture by capturing what happens after the AI processes your content — the actual human visit.

The three signals together tell the full story:

AI SCRAPER          →  AI model ingests your content
RAG BOT             →  AI fetches your content for a user query
LLM REFERRAL        →  Human clicks through from AI response

You can now track the entire AI content lifecycle: from crawl, to citation, to click.

Getting Started

LLM referral tracking is available now for all WebDecoy customers. If you already have the WebDecoy detection script installed, referral data is being collected automatically — no configuration changes needed.

To view your data:

1. Log in to app.webdecoy.com
2. Navigate to Monitoring → AI Detections
3. Open the AI Referrals tab

For API access, query referrals with:

GET /v1/detections?flags_contain=llm_referral

Full documentation is available in the AI Detections docs.

What’s Next

LLM referral tracking is the foundation for deeper AI traffic analytics. We’re building toward:

• Conversion attribution — Track which AI platforms drive not just visits, but signups and purchases
• Content citation alerts — Get notified when AI platforms start (or stop) citing specific pages
• Competitive AI visibility — Understand how your AI referral traffic compares to industry benchmarks

AI search is rewriting how people discover products and content. The companies that measure this channel early will have a significant advantage over those still treating AI traffic as “direct.”

Already using WebDecoy? Your LLM referral data is waiting in the dashboard. Not yet a customer? Start tracking your AI traffic today.

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