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Published in

October 24, 2026

· Updated: October 26, 2026

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More visitors now arrive from chat assistants and AI answer boxes, but many analytics setups still lump them into "direct" or "referral". Teams then argue about whether AI search matters, using numbers that cannot answer the question.

Measuring this traffic is an engineering task. You need to capture the referrer, classify it, store it safely and know where the data is blind. This article covers seven patterns, including a small classifier you can run.

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