Google AI Mode Is Here, But You Can’t Track It Properly

Google just rolled out AI Mode to US users.

I was testing if the clicks would show in Google Search Console, without any success. A post by Tom Critchlow on LinkedIn made me wonder how a click on a link in AI Mode would be recorded in analytics.

The tl;dr is that clicks to links in AI mode are not being recorded at all in Google Search Console, and they’re not sending a referrer value when you click. That means they’re treated as Unknown or Direct, depending on your analytics system.

Here’s the test, which I’ve repeated several times to ensure accuracy.

Pick a URL that doesn’t get any traffic on your site and paste it into AI mode. It will generate some info and a link to your URL which you can click.

After I clicked I checked Ahrefs Web Analytics for the page, which has real-time information, but you can check in Google Analytics or whatever analytics program you use.

As you can see below, we classify this click as coming from an Unknown location. In other analytics systems like Google Analytics, this would likely show as Direct.

What’s going on?

The link itself is marked with noreferrer in the code of the page. You can verify this by using inspect in your browser. This means that the referrer value is stripped, leading it to be treated as unknown.

As I mentioned earlier, for the last couple days I’ve been testing a few pages to see if clicks to links in AI Mode will show in Google Search Console. The answer, unfortunately, is no.

Here’s one from yesterday where I searched “what is amp ahrefs” and clicked. As you can see, I show no clicks in GSC.

If you look back at the code on the link, you’ll notice a ved value. That value indicates how a link was displayed or where the link was for Google. They correspond to different things like various SERP features or tabs.

Even though the link was tagged, the data doesn’t seem to be in Google Search Console. This could indicate that AI Mode tracking is coming soon though, possibly as a separate classification.

Final Thoughts