Google AI Mode traffic is untrackable
Google’s AI Mode hides referrer data, making traffic invisible in Google Search Console and analytics platforms. Is this Not Provided 2.0?
Google’s newly launched AI Mode in Search isn’t passing referral data. That means it’s impossible to know how many clicks you got from AI Mode in your analytics tools. Clicks also aren’t appearing in Google Search Console (GSC).
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Why we care. You have no way of knowing how much traffic you’re getting from AI Mode. Google continues to tell us its AI answers drive higher-quality clicks, without proof. We have no data to verify this. Frustratingly, Google continues to take away helpful data, making it impossible for us to make data-driven decisions.
Driving the news: Tom Critchlow, EVP audience growth at Raptive, first raised the issue on LinkedIn. Testing from Patrick Stox, product advisor, technical SEO, and brand ambassador at Ahrefs, confirmed that you can’t track clicks from AI Mode:
- Clicks on links shown in AI Mode don’t appear in Google Search Console.
- Analytics tools classify these visits as Direct or Unknown.
- The links generated in AI Mode are marked with a
noreferrerattribute, which strips the referrer value that would otherwise enable attribution.
Why? Lily Ray, vice president, SEO strategy and research at Amsive, shared her theory on LinkedIn, dubbing this “Not Provided 2.0” (a reference to when Google began encrypting searches and outbound clicks by default):
- “Google does NOT want us having access to traffic data for AI Mode, or AI Overviews for that matter, because it will reveal just how little traffic both are actually driving to external websites.
- It’s much more convenient to continue repeating some carefully crafted statement about how these tools ‘drive traffic to more websites than ever,’ without giving us any tools to confirm this.”
Temporary or permanent? In the Measuring the performance of your site section of the AI features and your website Google Search Central help document, Google wrote:
Just like the rest of the search results page, sites appearing in AI features (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode) are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console. In particular, they’re reported on in the Performance report, within the “Web” search type.
- When you visit the GSC What are impressions, position, and clicks? page, there is no mention of AI Mode. Only AI Overviews are mentioned.
- Also, Google’s newest blog post wrote seemed to be saying that we should no longer “focus too much on clicks” and more on “the overall value of your visits from Search.”
What Google is saying. Will AI Mode traffic data become visible? Perhaps, based on what Google’s John Mueller said on Linkedin :
- “This seems unexpected … I saw this somewhere else and had already sent it to the team to check, but haven’t heard back.”
For now, we remain in the dark.
Update May 28. Google fixed the issue in AI Mode.
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