Google’s new AI Mode in Search is making it harder for website owners to understand how people are finding their website from the search engine results page.
Links shown in Google’s AI Mode are being tagged with a ‘noreferrer’ attribute, meaning that when someone clicks on the link, no information is shared about where they came from.
Usually, when someone clicks a link on the results page, tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics track the visit.
These tools provide insights into how a visitor ended up on your website, such as the query that prompted them to click through. This can help website owners determine the content that is performing well.
With AI Mode, when a user clicks on a link that appears in an AI (artificial intelligence)-generated answer, those clicks either don’t appear in the tracking tools or are labelled incorrectly.
In Google Search Console, website owners can usually see how many users are visiting their site via the search engine results page; however, clicks from AI Mode simply don’t appear. It’s like the click didn’t even happen, leading to inaccurate performance figures.
The content on your website may be featured in AI answers and successful in attracting visitors, but you wouldn’t know, as clicks driven to the site via AI Mode aren’t being tracked.
Similarly, in the past, if a search engine user visited a site via the results page, Google Analytics would track this as Organic Search traffic. Now, if a user is using AI Mode, the traffic is tracked as coming from an ‘unknown’ source.
This means that you can’t tell where the user came from, or what kind of search led them to your website. As a result, the data you see is incomplete. Your site might be getting more visitors or converting at a higher rate in Organic Search results than performance reports show. This can make it harder for website owners to accurately measure what’s working well and plan future content based on current performance.
Need some help analysing the sources of traffic to your website? Reach out to the team of experts at Engage Web today.
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