What happened

When ChatGPT answers a question, it often includes a few website links, and one tap takes a customer to the business’s site. Since ChatGPT switched to its new GPT-6 model in early October, an analysis has found that many of these customers no longer show up in website traffic reports as coming from ChatGPT; they’re being counted as “direct” visits instead.

A traffic report, such as the monthly one your web agency sends you, sorts visitors into channels: people who came from a Google search go on one line, people who came from ChatGPT on another. Anyone it can’t place goes under “direct”, a line originally meant for people who typed your address in or used a bookmark.

Until now, when a customer clicked through from ChatGPT, your site received two clues: the link they clicked had a short extra bit on the end of the address reading chatgpt.com, and the browser passed on which page the customer had just been on. Reports relied on those two clues to put the visit on the ChatGPT line.

Cedric Huesler works at Adobe, which besides making Photoshop also sells software for analysing website traffic. He pointed out on LinkedIn that since GPT-6 arrived, links clicked from ChatGPT carry neither clue, so reports have no choice but to file these customers under direct.

He picked about 500 web pages that already got a fair number of their visitors from ChatGPT, then compared 9–13 October with the week before. Across those 500 pages, visits that reports credited to ChatGPT fell by about 31,000 a day; on the same pages, visits counted as direct went up by about 26,000 a day. One fell, the other rose, by similar amounts. His view is that most of the missing customers haven’t disappeared; they’ve just been recorded on another line.

This is indirect evidence worked out from the numbers, and from only the first few days. Huesler later added that sources had told him this might be a bug. As of 15 October, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, still hadn’t said whether the change was deliberate or a fault, or whether it will be fixed.

Why it matters to you

If your monthly report already has a ChatGPT line, the October figure may suddenly shrink. GPT-6 is being rolled out worldwide, so sites in Taiwan could be affected too; if you’re not sure whether your report has a ChatGPT line, your web agency can tell you.

Say you run a pet grooming salon in Luodong, Yilan. Over the past few months, the odd customer has mentioned finding you after asking ChatGPT “where in Luodong can I get my old dog bathed?”, and the ChatGPT line in your monthly report has always had a few visits on it. Then the October report arrives, that line is close to zero, and the natural thought is: has ChatGPT stopped recommending me?

You might ring your web agency to ask what’s going on, and they might suggest overhauling the site. But going by Huesler’s findings, that drop may well just be customers being recorded as direct. Before ChatGPT recommends a business, it often looks things up on the web, and the descriptions on your website are part of what it reads. If it is in fact still recommending you and you overhaul your site off a miscounted number, you might cut the very passages that got it recommending you.

For now, the ChatGPT line in your monthly report is like an alarm that has stopped working. Normally, when it drops, you know to worry; but for a salon like the one in Luodong, that line is already close to the floor, so if ChatGPT does start recommending the salon down the road instead, the report won’t show anything new. By the time you feel it in your takings, customers may have been heading next door for quite a while.

What to do about it

Now is the time to find out how ChatGPT is describing you to customers. ChatGPT now answers customers with the new GPT-6, so who it recommends and how it describes you may not be the same as last month. And even if OpenAI puts those two clues back one day, the customers missed in the meantime won’t come back into your monthly reports; you won’t be able to look back through them later to see whether ChatGPT kept recommending you over these weeks.

Take the salon in Luodong: a customer asks ChatGPT “Where in Luodong will someone bathe my old dog gently?”, and if the answer leaves the salon out, or gets its opening hours or services wrong, what needs changing is what ChatGPT is likely to read: the salon’s own website, plus how the salon is described on Google Maps, booking platforms and the like.

Once changes were made, you could at least check whether the number on that line went up; for now that line is off, and all your web agency has to go on is the direct line, with no way of telling which of those visits ChatGPT sent. Whether the changes worked will only show in ChatGPT’s answers: is the salon in Luodong being mentioned, and have the wrong opening hours been put right?

You don’t have to do any of this yourself. GEO is optimisation aimed at AI answers: getting a salon like the one in Luodong brought up by ChatGPT, and described correctly, when customers ask about bathing an old dog. With GeoWeb’s managed GEO, our team fixes your site’s content, brings what’s said about you elsewhere on the web into line, and regularly checks how AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity describe you. You just review the results.

When the October report arrives and the ChatGPT line really has dropped, hear what ChatGPT is saying about you right now, before you change anything on your site. Our demo is for exactly that: a session with one of our consultants, who shows you live. The consultant picks a question customers in your line of business often ask and puts it straight to ChatGPT, and you watch who it recommends and what it says when it gets to you. Whether your site needs changing also depends on what shape the site itself is in, so in the same session the consultant opens geoweb.tw’s free website audit (the GEO audit). The audit checks how well AI can understand your site and scores it across 12 areas, so you’ll see your own website’s score there and then.

Further reading