How to track ChatGPT traffic on Squarespace

Squarespace is popular with photographers, studios, consultants, restaurants and small shops: people who sell a service or a handful of products and rely on their site to look good. Those are the businesses people now ask ChatGPT to recommend. Squarespace's built-in analytics can show part of that traffic. Here's where to look, what the numbers leave out, and how to connect ChatGPT to the enquiries and orders you actually care about.

Step 1: Open the Traffic sources panel

1. From your site's menu, open Analytics, click Traffic, then click Traffic sources.
2. Set the date range to 30 days or more. AI visits are still a small share for most small sites, so short ranges are noisy.
3. Squarespace groups visits into channels: Direct, Social, Email, Referral and Search (plus Display ads, Paid search and Paid social on higher plans). A channel only appears if it had visits.

Step 2: Find ChatGPT inside Referral

Squarespace's own help points to Traffic sources for AI traffic, but the channel list in its help docs has no separate AI channel. A chatbot isn't a search engine or a social network, so a click from ChatGPT that keeps its referrer generally falls into Referral, which Squarespace describes as sites that link to you and don't fit another channel. If your panel shows a dedicated AI grouping, use that instead. Open Referral and look for chatgpt.com (older visits may show chat.openai.com). Because Referral also holds blogs, directories and partner sites, check the individual sources rather than the channel total.

Don't confuse this with the AI Visibility section of Squarespace's SEO panel. That tool tests prompts and reports whether AI answers mention your site. It doesn't count the visitors those answers send, which is what Traffic sources shows.

Step 3: Switch the KPI if you sell online

On Core, Plus and Advanced plans the panel has tabs for Visits, Revenue, Checkouts, Conv. rate, AOV and RPV. Pick Revenue or Checkouts to see whether ChatGPT visitors bought anything. Squarespace credits commerce KPIs to the visitor's last click, so a shopper who first found you through ChatGPT and later came back from a Google search or an email is credited to that last source, not to ChatGPT. Basic plans show Visits only.

Step 4: Read Direct with care

Squarespace counts a visit as Direct when there's no referring page, and it notes that links opened in a new window also count as Direct. Links opened from the ChatGPT mobile and desktop apps often arrive with no referrer, so some ChatGPT traffic is almost certainly sitting in your Direct number. You can't separate it after the fact. If Direct is climbing while your other marketing is flat, treat that as a hint, not proof.

Step 5: Look for the chatgpt.com UTM tag

ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of the links it shows. Squarespace keeps UTM parameters on normal pages, but URL redirects, password-protected pages and member areas can drop them, so a ChatGPT link that lands on a redirected old URL may lose its tag. If ChatGPT tends to cite an old page of yours, point the redirect at a live page and check that page in the panel instead.

What Squarespace Analytics can't tell you

For a service business the last row is often the biggest. The simple fix is to ask: add a required “How did you first hear about us?” field to your Squarespace form with ChatGPT, Google, another AI assistant, social media and referral as options, and ask the same thing on the phone. Our guide to wording that question covers why “first” matters.

Other AI assistants to check

In the same Referral list, look for perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai. Clicks from Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode look like ordinary Google search, so they land in Search, not Referral. The full host list is in our AI traffic tracking guide, and you can check the trend with our AI referral regex if you also run Google Analytics.

Connecting ChatGPT to leads and orders automatically

Which AI Sent works on Squarespace with one line of code: paste it in Settings → Advanced → Code Injection → Header (Code Injection needs a Squarespace plan that includes it). It then labels visits from ChatGPT and the other assistants, follows them to the form submission or order, and records each customer's “how did you hear about us?” answer, so every AI lead is marked Confirmed, Declared or Assisted by the evidence behind it. See all integrations.