Why Your ChatGPT Traffic Dropped in October (And Why It Might Be a Reporting Trap)
When tracking labels go missing, visits from AI tools can look like lost demand. Before changing marketing spending, ask three important questions.
EXPERT OPINION BY ROBERT GILLESPIE, AI MARKETING EXPERT
Photo: Getty Images
A drop in ChatGPT traffic would usually make a marketing team look for a reason. Maybe competitors are showing up more often, the company's content is no longer as useful, or the money spent making the company more visible in AI answers is not working. But in October, there was another possible explanation: visitors were still arriving, but the label showing where they came from had disappeared. This tracking problem made the analytics misleading.
In an analysis of about 500 pages where ChatGPT brought in at least 5 percent of visits, Adobe's Cedric Huesler found that recorded visits from ChatGPT fell by about 31,000 a day. At the same time, visits recorded as Direct went up by about 26,000 a day.
He compared October 9 through 13 with the week before.
On October 15, Huesler reported that the missing tracking label had returned. He said OpenAI had told him the day before that there was a bug. Based on his timeline, the problem began on October 8.
That was a brief technical problem, but it could have a much longer effect on a business. A company checking its marketing results might mistake a reporting problem for a drop in customer interest. It could then cut the work that was bringing customers to its website.
A missing label can change the story
How it works is simple. A link can contain a short label that tells a website where a visitor came from. In this case, the label was utm_source=chatgpt.com. A browser can also send information about the page that referred the visitor to the website. This information is called a referrer.
Huesler found that the affected links from ChatGPT sent neither the label nor the referrer information. Google's own analytics guidance explains that Direct traffic includes visits when the source is not clear, as well as visits from people who type a website address themselves.