Traffic that Gemini sends to your site has been close to invisible. Google has started adding UTM parameters to the links going out of Gemini, so those visits can show up in your analytics as coming from Gemini instead of disappearing into “direct”. A UTM parameter is a short tag on the end of a link that tells your analytics where the visitor came from.
Here is why it was invisible. Visits from AI chatbots often land in “direct” in GA4, and direct is just the fallback bucket your analytics uses when nothing ties the visit to a source, no referrer and no UTM. Gemini does send a referrer, but in the discussion where this was spotted, one person reported that the referrer mostly survives on desktop web, that pass through from the Gemini mobile app runs around 9 percent, and that Android assistant invocations strip it entirely. A UTM survives the in app webview, and it also shows up in your raw server logs.
What that buys you: you can see how much traffic Gemini actually sends, compare your AI referrers against each other and against traditional search, and argue for budget on an AI channel with real numbers instead of a feeling.
Two things worth doing now:
- Look at your source and medium report over the coming weeks and watch whether your direct traffic drops as Gemini visits get named. The gap is roughly what you were already getting and could not see.
- Keep your server logs, or ask whoever runs your hosting to keep them. The tag lands there too, which is your backup when the analytics side is messy.
For comparison, ChatGPT also tags its outgoing links, but only when the answer is grounded in web sources, not when it comes from its training data.
One caveat. Google’s implementation is undocumented, so nobody knows yet when Gemini adds the tag and when it does not. Treat whatever you see as a floor, not a full count.
