Which of your visits came from AI?

When someone clicks a link and lands on your site, their browser usually sends a header called Referer (misspelled in the original HTTP specification) with the address of the page they came from.

A visitor who clicked a link in a Reddit thread arrives with a referrer like https://www.reddit.com/. A visitor who clicked a Google result arrives with https://www.google.com/. A visitor who typed your address, or followed a link from a chat app, usually arrives with no referrer at all and is counted as direct.

The classifier reads those values and maps each one to a category, using the same rules that power the Referscope dashboard.

Direct does not mean people typed your address. It means the browser sent no referrer, which happens more often than most founders expect.

Messaging apps strip referrers. Slack, WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram and Discord open links in ways that do not pass a referrer, so links shared in private chats look like direct traffic.

HTTPS to HTTP loses the referrer. Browsers drop the referrer when a visitor moves from a secure page to an insecure one. If your site is not fully on HTTPS, you lose attribution from every HTTPS page that links to you.

Email clients behave differently. Webmail in a browser often passes a referrer; many desktop and mobile mail apps do not, so newsletter traffic often looks direct.

Some mobile apps drop referrers. Apps that open links in an in-app browser often send no referrer at all.

Some AI apps behave the same way. No tool can recover a referrer that was never sent, but knowing why helps you read your numbers honestly.

GA4: Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. Set the dimension to Session source and export the values.

Cloudflare: your zone dashboard, then Analytics, then Traffic, where the top referrers are listed.

Server access logs: look for the Referer header in your nginx or Apache logs.

Referscope: every visit in your dashboard is already classified, so there is nothing to paste.