A Broccoli Clean Trick: Spotting the A.I. Chatbot Web Traffic

Regardless of your personal views on Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini and regardless of your charity’s AI usage policies, those chatbots are—or will very shortly—be sending website traffic in your direction. This is nothing to be concerned about! If anything, it’s an opportunity.

We’re seeing the ​early signs of a behaviour shift​ where people are relying less on the traditional Google search, and replacing it with a chatbot conversation. And so, if the work your charity does is relevant to a person’s query, then it may well suggest your charity as the answer. A few use cases come to mind:

• A potential volunteer asks, “What charities near me I can volunteer with?”

• A young person asks, “Who should I talk to about a problem at home?”

• A potential donor says, “Tell me 5 charities I should consider donating to and why.”

Optimizing your website for chatbot traffic can be as straightforward as keeping up with common Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies, like having clear and concise titles and meta descriptions for your pages, and adding a sitemap on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

If you want to go a step further and you use Yoast SEO on WordPress, they have a simple feature you can flip on to ​generate an llms.txt file​ that is more easily read by chatbots. Essentially, it’s a bit like a sitemap, but for chatbots.

Your Broccoli Clean Trick:

Find out exactly how many website visitors you’re getting from AI chatbots

You don’t need to be a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) expert to do this, but we are assuming you at least have access to your organization’s GA4 account.

Step 1: Go to the Traffic Acquisition Report in your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property, navigate to the left-hand menu and select Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.

Step 2: Set the primary dimension above the data table, click the primary dimension dropdown menu (it could be set to “session default channel group”) and change it to “session source/medium”. This will show you the specific sources sending traffic to your site.

Step 3: Look for AI referrers in the “session source/medium” column for referrals from known AI platforms, such as “chatgpt.com / referral”, “perplexity.ai / referral”, “copilot.microsoft.com / referral”, and “gemini.google.com / referral”.

If you’re a GA4 expert, you can take this way further and dive into a deeper analysis of where these users are landing on your site, what they do while they’re there and more.