Traffic sources
The “Sources” tab, in the Referrals box, divides your content into a few buckets based on where the traffic came from, which you can then filter.
- Direct
- Paid/Campaign
- Organic
- Social
Here’s exactly how we organize pageviews into the four buckets above, based on where each visitor came from:
Direct
We group a visitor as “Direct” if they don’t have a referrer. This can happen for two reasons: the first is they typed your website directly into their browser URL bar, and the second is because the website they were on stripped the referrer before sending that visitor to your site (we cannot control this, as it’s something set on the referring site).
Paid/Campaign
We group a visitor as “Paid/Campaign” if they have a UTM present from the referrer, or if they have one of the following two parameters: msclkid or gclid. These mean the visitor clicked to your site from a paid Google ad or Bing ad.
Social
We group a visitor as “Social” if the referring source comes from: LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Quora , Discord, Pinterest or Flippa. The only reason we’d not group a visitor as “Social” if they came from a social site is if that social site stripped the referrer (which does happen, and is nothing we can control).
Mastodon intentionally does not send referrer information on outgoing links (to protect privacy), therefore we cannot track links from Mastodon, unless you use a UTM from Mastodon.
Organic
We group a visitor as “Organic” if they don’t fit into the above buckets. I.e. if they came from a common search engine (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, Brave and Yandex) AND if the referring source doesn’t have a UTM, msclkid or gclid, and is not from a social site.
Traffic from AI tools
Visits from AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity can appear in your Referrers box when the tool sends a referrer with the visit. Click that referrer to filter your dashboard and explore the pages those visitors reach and the events they complete. If a link includes campaign tags instead, you can find those in your UTM reports.
This measures visits to your website, not how often an AI tool mentions you or the prompts people enter. If a visit has neither a referrer nor campaign tags, Fathom cannot identify it as an AI referral. The Sources tab uses the categories described above; it does not add a separate AI category.