ChatGPT visits may be showing up as direct traffic after GPT-6
ChatGPT links appear to have lost their UTM tracking tags. Search Engine Roundtable reported the change on 14 October 2026. It seems to have started around the GPT-6 release, about a week earlier. OpenAI added the UTM tag in June 2026. Without it, visits from ChatGPT can be filed as direct traffic in your analytics.
Barry Schwartz, who wrote the report, says it is not clear whether the change was intentional. The article does not include a statement from OpenAI.
What the data shows
Cedric Huesler of Adobe shared the most detailed numbers on LinkedIn. He looked at about 500 pages where ChatGPT drove at least 5% of visits, and compared 9 to 13 October with the week before.
- ChatGPT visits fell by 31,000 a day.
- Direct visits rose by 26,000 a day on the same pages.
- Search visits fell 7%, which he says is the same as everywhere else.
- Direct traffic rose on two in three of the pages that lost ChatGPT traffic.
Huesler says GPT-6 opens links with window.open, which drops the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter. He says there is then no tag and no referrer, so analytics records a direct visit. He also found that the new direct visitors behave like ChatGPT visitors, for example in how often they see a consent banner on mobile.
Sébastien Billard posted on X that he also saw a sharp drop in ChatGPT human traffic since 9 October, and that he planned to look into the UTM parameter. These are third-party observations from a small set of sites. They are not confirmed by OpenAI.
Why it matters
Many teams use the ChatGPT referral line in their analytics as the only proof that AI search works. If that line drops while direct traffic rises, a report can wrongly show that ChatGPT stopped sending visitors. A budget decision based on that report could be wrong.
The reverse problem exists too. A rise in direct traffic can look like stronger brand awareness when some of it is really AI referrals.
What to do this week
- Compare ChatGPT referrals and direct traffic by day since 1 October. Look for a drop in one and a rise in the other on the same landing pages.
- Add a note to your reports that ChatGPT referral numbers may be undercounted from around 9 October.
- Check landing pages that rank well in AI answers but have few tracked visits. Those are the pages most likely to be affected.
- Ask new leads how they found you. A single "AI assistant" option in your form gives you data that no tag can remove.
- Track brand mentions and cited sources in AI answers directly, so your view of AI visibility does not depend on click tracking alone.
Treat the numbers as a signal, not a verdict, until OpenAI or more independent datasets confirm what changed.