Ryan Kelly: Hey there and welcome back to AI On the Fly. My name is Ryan Kelly, and today I have a special guest with me — Devin Halliday, Marketing Director for WSI Smart Marketing. We’re filming from Cabo San Lucas at the WSI Global Conference.
I thought, what’s better than to put a three-part mini-series together about tracking AI? How do we do it? Can we do it? Do we care about it? What are the tools for it? And why not have one of our specialists actually answer the questions — somebody who actually does it, facilitates it, runs the team that tracks it, and is able to find the stories in the numbers.
So Devin, I’m going to give you two questions in this episode. The first question is simple: can we really track traffic coming from AI third-party answer engines and things like that?
Devin Halliday: Yeah, great question. And the answer is yes. We can track traffic. We can see it all the way down to who came, where they came from, and what they’re doing while they’re on your site.
Ryan Kelly: Interesting. OK, so if we run an organization or a business that is watching analytics and tracking data and understanding where people are coming in from, what are some of the categories or things that we should be looking for that would show traffic? Where do we actually go to find this stuff?
Devin Halliday: Yeah, great question. I think the first and most important place to start is Google Analytics — just like Google tells you all the things you need to know about who came in through search, it also tells you who came in through AI search. Under the referrals section, in the AI platforms section, you can see whether it’s Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot. And then all the usual suspects are there — you can see engagement rates, site sessions, visitors, time, and conversions. All of the data is there. So that’s the first place to start for sure.
Ryan Kelly: OK, so look in analytics, go to referral traffic, figure out what different AI websites are sending you traffic, and start to learn your data. Listen, we’ve got four more questions coming in two more sessions. Can’t wait to see you again. Ryan Kelly, Devin Halliday — we’re your hosts today of AI On the Fly. Until next time, be safe.