Acquisition Channels
See which channel brought each visit, including traffic referred by AI assistants.
Logspot sorts every visit into one of seven acquisition channels so you can see where traffic comes from without tagging every link yourself. Classification happens when you run a report, not when the event arrives, so the channel breakdown covers your full history from the day you started tracking. There is no backfill step and nothing to configure.
The Seven Channels
| Channel | What lands here |
|---|---|
| Paid Search | A search engine referral or source, with a paid utm_medium such as cpc or ppc. |
utm_medium or utm_source is an email token: email, newsletter, and variants. | |
| AI Assistant | A referral or source matching a known assistant host, such as chatgpt.com, claude.ai, perplexity.ai, or gemini.google.com. |
| Organic Search | A search engine referral or source with no paid medium, or utm_medium=organic. |
| Social | A referral or source matching a social host, such as linkedin.com, x.com, reddit.com, or news.ycombinator.com. |
| Referral | Any other visit that arrived with a referrer or a utm_source. |
| Direct | No referrer and no utm_source. Someone typed the address, used a bookmark, or arrived from an app that strips referrers. |
How a Visit Is Classified
Logspot reads three things: the referrer, utm_source, and utm_medium. It then walks the table above
from top to bottom and stops at the first channel that matches.
Order matters, and Paid Search deliberately sits above Organic Search. The organic rule is a superset of the paid rule, so checking organic first would classify ad clicks as free traffic.
Two details worth knowing:
utm_source is matched as well as the referrer. Assistants often send no referrer at all, and some
stamp a source instead. ChatGPT, for example, sets utm_source=chatgpt.com. Matching both means a visit
is classified correctly whichever way it arrives.
Host matching is exact, or a true subdomain. chat.openai.com matches openai.com, but
notchatgpt.com and chatgpt.com.example.org do not. A lookalike domain cannot borrow another
channel's classification.
Where Channels Appear
Add the Channels widget to any dashboard from the widget picker to see the breakdown for a date range.
On Analytics → Revenue, switch the breakdown selector to Channel to see revenue by channel rather than by source, medium, or campaign.
On Analytics → Companies, each company shows the channel that first brought it to your site.
Tracking AI Assistant Traffic
AI Assistant is a first-class channel rather than a bucket inside Referral, because assistant traffic behaves differently from a normal link click and is worth measuring on its own.
Detection depends on the assistant sending a referrer or a utm_source. Some assistants send neither,
and traffic from those lands in Direct instead. A low AI Assistant count is therefore a floor rather
than a precise figure. The hosts Logspot matches are drawn from published referrer observations where
those exist, and from product names where they do not, so the list grows as assistants change what they
send.