ChatGPT didn’t stop sending visitors. It stopped telling you it sent them.
A quick recap of the last few days:
▪️ Oct 6: tested Eric Wu’s “direct is secretly AI” idea across ~600 brands. It was real but rare, and showed up mostly on docs and help pages.
▪️ Oct 10: asked how much of direct SEO/GEO teams can claim. It’s about 1–2 extra visits for every 10 you can track.
▪️ Oct 13: tracked ChatGPT visits fell ~60% within a day as GPT-6 rolled out to nearly all answers.
So were those visits lost, or hidden?
GPT-6 opens links with window(.)open(url, “_blank”, “noopener,noreferrer”) and drops ?utm_source=chatgpt(.)com. There’s no tag and no referrer, so your analytics files the visit under direct.
To check, I looked at ~500 pages where ChatGPT drove 5%+ of visits, comparing Oct 9–13 with the week before:
▪️ ChatGPT: −31k visits a day. Direct: +26k a day on the same pages. Search: −7%, the same as everywhere else.
▪️ Direct rose on 2 in 3 pages that lost ChatGPT traffic. The week before it was a coin flip, and search on those same pages rose on only 45%.
▪️ The new direct visitors behave like ChatGPT visitors. On mobile, the share seeing the consent banner (new to the site) went from 36% to 44%. For ChatGPT visitors it’s 55%.
What this means for your reporting:
1. Your ChatGPT number fell off a cliff and your direct number grew a bit. Report both together.
2. Watch direct on the deep pages ChatGPT used to send people to. That’s your new proxy.
3. Your GA4/AA trend line broke on Oct 8–10. Annotate it before someone else explains it.
It’s early: 4 days of data, sampled, and only the pages where ChatGPT was a big share can show the signal.
Are you seeing direct jump on your ChatGPT landing pages?
A quick recap of the last few days:
▪️ Oct 6: tested Eric Wu’s “direct is secretly AI” idea across ~600 brands. It was real but rare, and showed up mostly on docs and help pages.
▪️ Oct 10: asked how much of direct SEO/GEO teams can claim. It’s about 1–2 extra visits for every 10 you can track.
▪️ Oct 13: tracked ChatGPT visits fell ~60% within a day as GPT-6 rolled out to nearly all answers.
So were those visits lost, or hidden?
GPT-6 opens links with window(.)open(url, “_blank”, “noopener,noreferrer”) and drops ?utm_source=chatgpt(.)com. There’s no tag and no referrer, so your analytics files the visit under direct.
To check, I looked at ~500 pages where ChatGPT drove 5%+ of visits, comparing Oct 9–13 with the week before:
▪️ ChatGPT: −31k visits a day. Direct: +26k a day on the same pages. Search: −7%, the same as everywhere else.
▪️ Direct rose on 2 in 3 pages that lost ChatGPT traffic. The week before it was a coin flip, and search on those same pages rose on only 45%.
▪️ The new direct visitors behave like ChatGPT visitors. On mobile, the share seeing the consent banner (new to the site) went from 36% to 44%. For ChatGPT visitors it’s 55%.
What this means for your reporting:
1. Your ChatGPT number fell off a cliff and your direct number grew a bit. Report both together.
2. Watch direct on the deep pages ChatGPT used to send people to. That’s your new proxy.
3. Your GA4/AA trend line broke on Oct 8–10. Annotate it before someone else explains it.
It’s early: 4 days of data, sampled, and only the pages where ChatGPT was a big share can show the signal.
Are you seeing direct jump on your ChatGPT landing pages?
As posted by Cedric Huesler on LinkedIn.