Channels
Updated October 18, 2026
The Channels tab of the Sources panel groups visits by the kind of place they came from, so you can see at a glance how much traffic comes from search, from AI assistants or from your newsletter, without adding up referrers yourself.
Click a channel to filter the whole dashboard by it, like any other row.
The channels
| Channel | When |
|---|---|
| Direct | No referrer and no campaign tags: typed addresses, bookmarks, apps that hide the referrer |
| Organic search | Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Yahoo, Qwant, Brave Search and other search engines |
| AI assistants | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Mistral, Grok and similar |
| Organic social | Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Bluesky, Hacker News and similar |
Webmail such as Gmail or Outlook on the web, or campaign tags with utm_medium=email or newsletter |
|
| Paid search | utm_medium of cpc, ppc, paid or paidsearch from a search engine |
| Paid social | utm_medium=paid_social, or cpc from a social network |
| Display | utm_medium of display, banner, cpm or native |
| Affiliates | utm_medium=affiliate |
| Referral | Any other website linking to you |
| Other campaigns | Campaign tags that fit none of the above, for example utm_medium=print for a QR code on a flyer |
Campaign tags win over the referrer: a newsletter link tagged utm_medium=email counts as Email even when it is opened in Gmail on the web, and a Google Ads click tagged utm_medium=cpc counts as Paid search, not Organic search. See Campaigns and UTM tags for tagging your links.
Why some visits look direct
Many apps and some browsers do not send a referrer: links opened from WhatsApp, Slack, desktop email clients or PDF files often arrive as Direct. Tag the links you share in those places with UTM parameters to see them under their own channel.
API
GET /api/v1/sites/{site}/stats/breakdown/channels returns the channels with their visitors, and filters[channel]=Organic search filters any statistic. See the API.