GA4 can show referral traffic from AI assistants when those visits arrive in the browser. It does not give SEO teams a first-class report for server-side AI crawler fetches and fetch-to-visit correlation.
HitKeep is a better fit when the question is not just how many visits came from ChatGPT, but also which pages AI systems fetched before those visits appeared.
When HitKeep is the better fit
- AI crawler fetch records from CloudFront, nginx, Caddy, app servers, or edge logs.
- AI-referred human visits from browser tracking.
- Correlation between fetched paths and later AI-referred visits.
- Opportunity pages for SEO work.
- Failure hotspots for 4xx and 5xx crawler requests.
- EU or US managed cloud for a quick client pilot.
When GA4 is still needed
You can run HitKeep beside GA4 during a pilot. Use HitKeep for AI crawler visibility and GA4 for Google ecosystem reporting until the client decides what should stay.
- Google Ads integration.
- Query-to-session attribution beyond aggregate Search Console rows.
- BigQuery workflows.
- App analytics.
- Predictive audiences.
- GA4 exploration reports.
What the setup requires
For CloudFront-hosted sites, use CloudFront AI crawler tracking. For the product report, use AI Visibility Analytics.
- hk.js on the site for browser pageviews, AI-referred visits, goals, and automatic events.
- Server-side AI fetch ingest for crawler requests.