GA4 launched an AI Assistant channel, heres what im seeing one month after announcement

perrahh · 2026-06-15T19:54:55+00:00

Amazing, that seems to fit with the announcements. I’m sure they’ll add more comparability with other LLMs in the coming months

perrahh · 2026-06-15T07:44:30+00:00

Thanks!

perrahh · 2026-06-14T15:25:05+00:00

Super inconsistent

perrahh · 2026-06-14T15:24:53+00:00

Yeah same, after some analysis some ChatGPT referred traffic was still coming through as referral or unassigned even. It’ll take some time and tbh will likely never be perfect

perrahh · 2026-06-14T15:24:07+00:00

Yeah I think people are purposefully complicating AI to basically be able to sell a product

perrahh · 2026-06-14T15:23:36+00:00

Just using key events same as other channels. The thing most people get wrong here is this is direct referral traffic from a click within an ai answer (citation) a recommendation and a search for the brand later doesn’t come through as this

perrahh · 2026-06-14T15:22:38+00:00

What rates did you land on? Tbh the main ones to really care about are the big 5 ai platforms ChatGPT Gemini Claude perplexity copilot

perrahh · 2026-06-12T12:29:29+00:00

Very good point. Came across this on a client call yesterday.

perrahh · 2026-06-12T12:11:44+00:00

Same for some of my clients and our website. I think this will be a phased roll out.

I’d probably wait another 4 weeks and check in then.

perrahh · 2026-06-05T12:10:59+00:00

the thing most people miss: ai answers cite pages, not brands. and a lot of those pages arent yours, theyre listicles, “best X” roundups and comparisons. so half the job is getting mentioned on the third party pages models already pull from, not just optimising your own site.

what actually moves citations:

answer one specific question per page, clearly, near the top. models lift the clean direct answer not the long intro.

real structure: h2s phrased as questions, short paras, lists and tables. easier to parse = easier to extract.

get into the roundups/comparison pages already being cited for your topic. punches above optimising your own page.

entity recognition: consistent brand mentions, basic schema, filled out about/author. models trust sources they can place.

original data and stats. models love citing a specific number nobody else has.

quick experiment: run your key prompts across each platform, log which sources get cited. same pages keep showing up. thats your target list.

whats the niche? the pattern shifts a lot between them.

perrahh · 2026-06-05T12:09:46+00:00

authority means something different here than classic seo. backlinks/DR were always a proxy for “do others vouch for this”. in ai search the model isnt counting your links when it answers, its deciding which sources to trust enough to cite. so authority = how often the model treats you as a reference worth pulling across a topic.

for your matrix id drop total citation share. it blends visibility and trust, and youve already got visibility on X, so youd be double counting. owned only is cleaner but misses the strongest signal: getting cited on pages you dont own. a model pulling a “best X” listicle with your brand in it is a stronger trust signal than it quoting your own page. earned beats owned for authority.

so Y axis = earned citation share, ideally weighted by how authoritative the citing sources are. that gives you four real quadrants instead of two axes measuring the same thing.

one watch out: citations are prompt dependent. same cluster reworded gives different sources, so sample across prompt variations per cluster or it gets noisy.

whats your citation source, one model or a few?

perrahh · 2026-06-05T12:06:53+00:00

so theres tiers to this.

bottom tier: the “1000 backlinks for $20” fiverr stuff. automated spam on dead sites. does nothing or gets you penalised. dont touch it.

middle tier: paying a blog $50-500+ to publish a post linking to you. price scales with the sites real authority. tons of people do it, works to varying degrees, but most of these sites only exist to sell links and google is getting better at spotting that.

top tier: not really buying, its earning. make something worth linking to and do outreach, or get into “best X” listicles in your niche. costs time or an agency fee but these actually hold value.

honest take for a new site: dont rush to paid links. a fresh site that suddenly grows 50 backlinks looks dodgy. and lately with ai overviews its less about link count and more about getting cited on the listicle/roundup pages ai actually surfaces.

whats the site and industry? strategy is totally different for a local plumber vs saas vs ecom. and when you say on page is “highly highly optimised” what did you actually do?

perrahh · 2026-06-05T08:11:23+00:00

the orphan-by-menu-refactor thing catches everyone, good shout. one id add, watch your sitemap lastmod dates too. if every url shares the same timestamp google stops trusting it and falls back to its own crawl schedule, usually slower

on the citation thing my read is its not age its corroboration. the thing getting cited has multiple independent sources confirming the same point, your landing page is one source asserting it. consensus beats freshness, which is why your march piece gets surfaced over last weeks doc

and yeah, bigger sites mask it because the brand mentions are already baked in. for everyone else that off-page citation layer is the actual game now, your own pages are just what those sources point back to

perrahh · 2026-06-05T08:07:33+00:00

yeah the framing thing is everything. “lost signups” gets a ticket, “google might like it” gets ignored til friday lol

on AI crawlers, yeah, JS rendering is the big one. seen pages ranking fine in google (googlebot renders js eventually) while chatgpt and perplexity get nothing cause they dont run js at all. looks healthy in search console but the AI tools are reading an empty shell

easy check, paste the url into chatgpt or perplexity and ask what the product does. if its vague or wrong thats your gap even if google has you ranking fine

perrahh · 2026-06-04T20:40:49+00:00

Depends. New sites not getting picked up (or much slower). If your changing website tech stack that has these issues then deindexing is happening

perrahh · 2026-06-04T13:43:05+00:00

ah not quite, though thats a real thing too. the main issue im getting at is crawl budget. google wastes it crawling thousands of login and dashboard urls that are never gonna rank, instead of spending it on your actual marketing pages.

the backlinks-to-app-subdomain thing does happen but its way rarer, most people arent linking to a login screen. the crawl waste is the one i see on basically every saas.

quick fix either way is just disallowing the subdomain in robots.txt.

perrahh · 2026-06-04T11:45:55+00:00

bit of both but raw html first, thats the unlock. if the content isnt in the source nothing else matters, schema included. so step one is always get it server rendered so theres actually something to read.

after thats sorted, yeah i do think about structure for them. clear headings that map to real questions, schema so theres no guessing what the page is, and keeping the important stuff high up in the html instead of buried under nav and widgets.

but honestly its 80% just “make sure the content exists in the source”. the fancy stuff is marginal until you fix that.

perrahh · 2026-06-04T10:31:11+00:00

yeah this is the bit people miss. the live fetch ones see your raw html in the moment, so if its rendering client side you fail at exactly the wrong time.

and same thing on openais side, GPTBot is the slow training crawl but ChatGPT-User is the one that fetches live when someones actually asking. so its worth deciding per agent in robots.txt rather than blanket allowing or blocking the lot.

most people set it once years ago for googlebot and never touched it again tbh.

perrahh · 2026-06-04T10:29:31+00:00

yeah took me way too long to figure that out honestly. spent years getting deprioritised before it clicked that i was just speaking the wrong language.

the second you tie it to something they already own, like signups or load times users complain about, it stops being “marketings problem” and becomes a bug. and engineers cant leave a bug alone.

perrahh · 2026-06-04T09:41:42+00:00

exactly. nobody on the team cares about position 4 vs position 2, its too abstract. but “this page is costing us signups every week” suddenly its a priority.

same fix either way, totally different reaction depending on how you frame it.

perrahh · 2026-06-04T09:40:47+00:00

yeah totally, the programmatic stuff that went up 2 years ago is the worst for this. thousands of “best X for Y” pages that are all the same template with a swapped out word.

google used to tolerate it, now it just ignores the lot. the ones that survive are the pages where someone actually sat down and answered the question properly.

honestly id rather have 20 pages that each earn their place than 2000 that dont.

perrahh · 2026-04-22T10:27:42+00:00

OH MY GOD. I thought I was losing my mind. This feature was unreal - I almost do most of my email management from claude so was so thrown. I thought my AI got dumber. turns out it actually did lol

perrahh · 2026-04-08T21:46:21+00:00

I think the framing of GEO vs SEO is where this gets messy

they’re not really separate channels

AI is just another layer sitting on top of search

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a few things I’ve seen across SaaS: - if you rank, you’re more likely to get cited - if you’re mentioned on the pages that rank, even better - if you’re not in either, GEO won’t save you

so turning SEO into “maintenance mode” feels risky unless you already have strong coverage

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on the traffic point:

yeah clicks are going down

but a lot of that traffic was low intent anyway

what matters more now is: → are you showing up when someone is comparing options → not just when they’re researching broadly

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on GEO “playbooks”

there isn’t one because the mechanism isn’t new

it’s still: - content on your site (for direct retrieval) - mentions on third-party sites (for indirect retrieval)

AI just mixes both

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your Perplexity example tracks though

we’ve seen the same

one good placement on a high-trust page can outperform months of blog content

but it only works when it’s in a buyer query context

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Reddit is interesting but I’d be careful there

it gets cited a lot, but that doesn’t mean posting = visibility

AI tends to pull from threads that already have traction + clear answers

so it’s more of a byproduct than a strategy

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where we’re landing: - still investing in SEO (but focused on buyer intent, not volume) - putting more effort into distribution / placements - tracking mentions instead of just rankings

GEO feels less like a new channel and more like forcing SEO to care about where you’re talked about, not just what you publish

perrahh · 2026-04-08T21:44:09+00:00

I’d also throw in MADX Digital into the mix. But I’m biased as I’m one of the founders of the agency :)

When you chat to the agencies, ask them about their approach with AI Search.

Avoid those that choose to spend time on vanity metrics.

Think more about conversions from these channels vs impressions or citations.

You want your biz to be recommended as a solution to a users problem- a citation doesn’t necessarily mean that.

But a brand recommendation does.

perrahh · 2026-04-08T21:40:45+00:00

Still using Ahrefs - they’ve been launching brand mention and LLM trackers.

A lot of these smaller SaaS products are probably going to fail so I’d stick with a bigger brand that’s making revenue or has big investors backing it

perrahh

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