AI referral attribution
Measuring the visits that arrived from an AI answer, the traffic-side complement to share of voice. It is weaker than it looks.
What AI referral attribution means
Referrer granularity varies by engine, some send none, and agentic browsers send a browser's.
What AI referral attribution does not show
A visit proves a person followed a link once; it is not evidence that the page influenced any future answer, and a page cited often with no click-through is invisible to it entirely. Useful as a trend on one site; not comparable across engines or sites.
Terms this definition uses
Related terms in Measurement and evidence
The vocabulary for saying how strongly something is known.
read equivalence · content-change clock · self-claim ledger · agent task canary · revocation delta · signed verdict · hash-prefix lookup · k-anonymity · publication floor · data snapshot · evidence level · false positive · denominator note · percentile rank · population baseline · cohort asymmetry · self-audit invariant · unscored measurement · dated series · change receipt · regression · finding age · graded through a wall · self-audit · placeholder in record · fetcher disagreement · own-host loop · score version · row review · double-counted defect · cosmetic row · gated row · log file analysis · finding fingerprint · finding state · headroom · fix list · render gap · lab data · Lighthouse · RUM · LCP · CLS · INP · topicality · intent coverage · canary · citation rate · presence rate · answer stability
Questions about AI referral attribution
What is AI referral attribution?
Measuring the visits that arrived from an AI answer, the traffic-side complement to share of voice. It is weaker than it looks.
What does AI referral attribution not show or guarantee?
It is weaker than it looks. A visit proves a person followed a link once; it is not evidence that the page influenced any future answer, and a page cited often with no click-through is invisible to it entirely. Useful as a trend on one site; not comparable across engines or sites.
Which area of the glossary does AI referral attribution belong to?
Measurement and evidence: The vocabulary for saying how strongly something is known.
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See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.