Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the current version of Google Analytics, the service you use to measure how visitors use your website or app. GA4 works on the basis of events rather than sessions: every action, such as a page view, a click or a purchase, is an event. GA4 replaced Universal Analytics. Standard Universal Analytics properties have not processed data since 1 July 2023.
Why does it matter?
Search Console tells you what happens in Google before someone clicks. GA4 tells you what visitors do on your site afterwards: which source they came from, which pages they viewed and whether they got in touch or bought something. Traffic that arrives through a link in an AI assistant can often be seen in GA4 as a referral source too.
Example
Say a heating engineer wants to know how many quote requests come in through the website. In GA4 you mark the submission of the quote form as a key event. You then see, per source such as Google, a newsletter or an AI assistant, how many requests came in.
Common mistake
Only looking at visitor numbers. Without key events set up, such as a submitted form, you cannot tell which traffic produces anything. A second mistake: campaign links without UTM parameters, so newsletter traffic arrives without a recognisable label.
How to make traffic from ChatGPT and other AI assistants visible separately is covered in Tracking traffic from ChatGPT and other AI assistants in Google Analytics 4.