ChatGPT stopped adding a utm_source tag and referrer data to its links after OpenAI released GPT-6, so visits it sends now get counted as direct traffic in Google Analytics and similar tools. Adobe’s Cedric Huesler tracked about 500 pages that got at least 5% of their visits from ChatGPT and found ChatGPT traffic fell by about 31,000 visits a day in the week after the launch while direct traffic rose by about 26,000 on the same pages. Those untracked links are also showing up far more often, according to SEO researcher Tomek Rudzki, who compared answers to an identical set of 1 million prompts on either side of the release and found direct website links in 42% of them, up from 8% to 10%. Rudzki found 54% of those links went to a homepage rather than the specific page with the answer. Read my theory on why they’re doing that.
