GA4 is Lying to You: AI Assistant and GEO Attribution Issues

Is GA4 lying about your AI traffic? Almost certainly.

Measuring Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is currently a massive blind spot for marketers. AI platforms are driving more hotel bookings, website visits and brand discovery than ever, yet GA4 often fails to show where those users actually originated.

The result? Brands can underestimate the impact of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AI platforms while continuing to credit Google Search, direct traffic or other channels for journeys that were actually influenced by AI.

Here are three ways your AI traffic is being under-attributed.

1. The New GA4 AI Assistant Channel is Flawed

GA4's new AI Assistant channel sounds like the answer to measuring AI traffic. Unfortunately, it is far from complete.

GA4 can split ChatGPT clicks across several different mediums, including AI Assistant, organic, referral and Unassigned. This means that if you only look at the AI Assistant channel, you are likely missing a significant proportion of your AI-generated visits.

As Search Engine Journal highlights, the current channel grouping can undercount AI traffic, making it difficult for marketers to understand the true scale of visits coming from generative platforms.

For brands investing in GEO, this matters. If your reporting dashboard says AI generated 100 visits, the actual number could be considerably higher once traffic incorrectly classified elsewhere is included.

2. Google Business Tracking Issue in ChatGPT & Claude

For hospitality and local searches, ChatGPT and Claude pull your Google Maps link. If your listing uses standard UTM parameters (e.g., utm_source=google), GA4 attributes that ChatGPT or Claude click as Google, so Google takes their credit.

That creates a significant blind spot for hotels and other local businesses. A traveller might ask ChatGPT for the best hotels in a destination, receive your property as a recommendation, and then click through to your Google Maps listing. From there, they might visit your website, check availability, call the hotel or make a booking. The original AI interaction has influenced the entire journey, but GA4 may only see a Google referral.

The problem is that the final click and the original source of demand are not necessarily the same thing. Google may be the channel that delivers the visitor, but ChatGPT or Claude may have been the platform that introduced them to your brand in the first place. Standard attribution models have very little visibility into that distinction.

For hospitality brands, this matters because Google Business Profiles are often an important part of the customer journey. If AI platforms increasingly use those listings as a way of directing users to local businesses, more AI-influenced journeys could end up being reported as Google traffic.

Without accounting for this, brands risk underestimating the role of AI in discovery while overstating the contribution of traditional search and local channels. The result is a misleading picture of where demand is actually coming from -  and where your GEO investment is really having an impact.

3. The Unattributed Downstream Impact of AI Recommendations

Even perfect tracking misses AI's real value. A Similarweb AI downstream attribution study found that 55.9% of visits influenced by AI recommendations actually arrive days later via search. Users get the recommendation in ChatGPT, close the app, and Google your hotel later on.

That creates a major attribution gap. By the time the customer reaches your website, there may be no visible connection between the original AI recommendation and the eventual organic search visit. GA4 sees a user arriving from Google, but it cannot necessarily see that AI influenced the decision several hours or days earlier. The result is a customer journey that looks like a search-driven conversion, even when AI played an important role in creating the demand in the first place.

For hotels, this is particularly important because booking decisions rarely happen in a single session. A traveller might ask an AI assistant for recommendations, compare several properties, return to the question later, search for the hotel independently and only then visit the website to book. Each of those interactions can happen across different devices, platforms and sessions, making the original AI influence increasingly difficult to connect to the final conversion.

How to Measure AI

If you are judging your AI ROI based on the GA4 AI Assistant channel, you are missing the full picture.

To measure true impact, it helps to:

• Track brand search demand and competitive share of search alongside your AI visibility brand mentions and citations.
• Make use of Google’s new Generative AI Performance report, to find how many impressions your pages are getting in Google’s AI surfaces.
• Utilise Bing’s much more in-depth AI Performance reporting to see your cited pages, grounding queries and more.
• Create your own default channel group which includes all trackable AI visits, for example - source/medium matches partial regex: .*(gpt|openai|perplexity|bard|gemini|copilot|claude|anthropic|deepseek|grok|qwant|mistral|kimi|meta\.ai|pi\.ai|phind|you\.com|poe|character\.ai|huggingface).*
• If your brand asks users where they heard about you, you will get a better idea of the broader influence on your brand’s visibility and discovery, and you will find that AI touches more customer journeys than your GA4 channel groups tell you.

The Future of Hotel Marketing: Visibility Beyond GA4

As AI continues to reshape how travellers discover, research and choose hotels, visibility across search, social media and AI platforms is becoming increasingly important. At Click2Convert, we help hotels strengthen their digital presence through SEO, GEO, content, social media and performance marketing - ensuring your brand is visible throughout the customer journey and positioned to capture more demand.

If you'd like to explore how AI and digital marketing can help your hotel attract more qualified traffic and increase direct bookings, we'd be delighted to help.

Get in touch to discuss how we can strengthen your hotel's visibility and make sure your brand is being discovered wherever today's travellers are searching.