How to track where your customers found you
Combine three kinds of evidence: what the customer tells you, the referral information your website captures, and aggregate search data. Keep them separate and preserve an unknown category. Count distinct relevant enquiries and paid work privately; a search impression or an AI mention is not itself a lead.
What this looks like in practice
Illustrative record: one prospect reports finding a contractor through an AI assistant and later sends the website link to a partner. The partner's visit may have no AI referrer. Keep the reported discovery and the observed website data as separate facts rather than forcing them to match.
How it works
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Define a genuine enquiry and exclude tests, spam and duplicates.
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Record customer-reported discovery during the normal conversation.
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Keep available referral and landing-page information with the enquiry.
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Review search data over consistent date ranges.
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Compare distinct prospects, replies, quotes and actual payments.
Define the outcome before counting it
Decide what qualifies as a relevant request for the service you sell. A message asking for a service outside your scope is different from a suitable quote request. Two submissions about the same job should not automatically become two prospects.
Keep the business record private and define the reporting period. Separate received requests, qualified opportunities, quotes accepted and payments received. An invoice issued is not the same as money collected.
Ask a simple discovery question
During your normal conversation, ask how the person heard about the business. Record the answer faithfully. If they say ChatGPT or Grok recommended you, that is customer-reported AI discovery and deserves its own category.
Do not require a screenshot to acknowledge what the customer said. At the same time, do not turn a verbal report into a count of tracked AI clicks or assume every other enquiry came from the same channel.
Use website referral information with its limits
A referring host or campaign tag can help identify a journey, but some visits arrive without either. Apps, privacy settings and copying links can leave incomplete information. Keep unknown traffic unknown rather than assigning it to the channel you hope is working.
Store only what the workflow needs. Names, emails, phone numbers and typed messages belong in the private enquiry system, not in general analytics events. Machine tags can describe the page and channel without repeating personal details.
Read search reports as discovery evidence
Search Console's performance report describes activity in Google Search. Use consistent dates and inspect relevant queries and pages where the report provides them. Do not equate an impression with a visit or a click with an enquiry.
Compare this evidence with the private lead record. You may see more relevant queries before receiving enough enquiries to assess the commercial result. Record the data gap instead of filling it with an assumed conversion rate.
Sample AI answers consistently
Choose a small set of realistic questions and record the platform, date, wording, mentioned business and cited URL where present. Check factual accuracy as well as presence. Keep questions stable when comparing observations.
A manually checked answer is a sample, not a universal ranking. Reports from real prospects can complement it. The practical review asks whether suitable people are finding the business and whether their enquiries become work, while acknowledging that no single tool sees the entire journey.
Common questions
Should unknown traffic be counted as AI traffic?
No. Keep an unknown category. A missing referrer is not proof of a particular source.
Do I need a new analytics subscription?
Not necessarily. Start with the enquiry records, customer conversations and reports you already have. Add a tool only when it answers a specific unresolved question.
What should I review each month?
Distinct relevant enquiries, replies, quotes and payments, with search and referral observations alongside them. Keep date ranges and definitions consistent.
Get help with your next step
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