u/Rare-Reflection-6035

Been watching my analytics for the last few months and the "direct" bucket keeps creeping up in a way that doesn't match anything I'm doing in social or email. Suspect a chunk is clicks from AI answers but I can't prove it.

For people who have actually looked into this: have you found a clean way to attribute traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini? UTMs only help if you control the source. Server logs catch some referer but most of these tools strip it or send the user through a redirect.

A few things I've tried:

1. Filtering "direct" traffic by landing page to see if certain deep URLs are getting hit by users who shouldn't know them by heart.
2. Searching my own brand and topic queries in ChatGPT and Perplexity weekly to see if I'm cited, then comparing to traffic spikes.
3. Asking new leads "how did you hear about us" and watching the AI mentions tick up.

All three are messy. None of them give a clean attribution number.

What's actually working for you? Or is everyone in the same boat and we're all just guessing?