Google just quietly added a new report inside Google Analytics that tells you something you couldn’t easily see before: how many people are finding your website because ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude recommended it to them.
If you run a local business — a roofing company, a contractor, anyone people search for by asking an AI instead of typing into Google — this is worth two minutes of your time. Here’s exactly where to look.
The 2-minute check
- Open Google Analytics (GA4 — if you’re not sure you have it connected to your site, that’s step zero, and worth getting set up before anything else on this list).
- Click Reports in the left sidebar.
- Click Acquisition, then Traffic Acquisition.
- Find the dropdown near the top of the table and make sure it’s set to Default Channel Group.
- Scroll the list for a channel called AI Assistant. Google just added this — if your site is getting any real traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, it shows up here as its own tracked source.
That’s it. If there’s a real number next to it, AI search engines are already sending people to your site — which means, at least some of the time, they’re already recommending you by name when someone asks a question like “who’s a good roofer in [your city].”
Why this actually matters, not just a fun stat
For years, “SEO” meant one thing: rank higher in Google’s blue links. That’s still real, but it’s no longer the whole picture. A growing share of people aren’t searching anymore — they’re asking. “Who’s a reliable roofer near me,” “how do I know if I have hail damage,” “should I file an insurance claim for my roof” — these are exactly the kinds of questions people are now typing into ChatGPT instead of Google, and the AI gives them a direct answer, sometimes a direct recommendation, without them ever seeing a list of website links to click through.
If your business isn’t showing up in that AI Assistant number, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong — most businesses aren’t tracking this yet, and even fewer have done anything on purpose to show up there. It just means there’s a real, still-early opportunity most of your competition hasn’t found yet.
If the number’s low (or zero), here’s what actually moves it
This isn’t the same playbook as ranking in regular Google search, and most of what’s out there about “AI SEO” is guessing. Based on real research into how these AI tools actually decide what to recommend, three things matter more than anything else:
- Being mentioned by other real, credible sources — local news, industry associations, review sites. AI tools weigh third-party mentions of your business name heavily; they’re not just reading your own website.
- Clear, direct answers to real questions, written in plain language — not sales copy. The AI is looking for the most useful, trustworthy answer to a specific question, not the flashiest ad.
- Being specific to your actual area. A generic “we serve the DFW area” page is far less useful to an AI trying to answer “who’s a good roofer in [specific neighborhood]” than content that’s actually about that neighborhood.
Getting recommended and actually getting cited are two different things
Google publishes its own real guidance on this — not a third party’s guess, their AI-optimization guide. The short version: create genuinely helpful, people-first content, organize it so readers (not just AI) can find the answer easily, and skip the gimmicks — you don’t need special “AI-only” markup, and rewriting content specifically for AI tools instead of real customers tends to backfire.
There’s an important distinction hiding in that guidance: being ELIGIBLE to be cited and actually GETTING cited are two separate hurdles. Eligibility is the content-quality gate — does your page meet the bar to be considered at all. Retrieval is which specific passage an AI tool actually pulls out and shows someone. A page can clear the eligibility bar and still lose on retrieval if the actual answer is buried in a long paragraph instead of stated plainly. A simple way to check your own site: paste one of your own pages into ChatGPT and ask it which single sentence answers the customer’s actual question. If there isn’t one clean sentence that does it, that’s the fix — not more content, a clearer answer.
The honest version
This is a real, measurable, early-stage opportunity — not a guarantee, and not overnight. Nobody has this fully figured out yet, including the companies selling “AI SEO” services. But checking this number today costs nothing, and knowing where you stand is the first real step.
Have questions about what your AI Assistant number means, or what to do next? Reach out — we’re happy to walk through it.