Traffic Attribution Analytics
Know exactly where your traffic comes from.
Including the visitors your other tools can’t see.
Referrer Attribution is traffic attribution analytics for websites and applications. It identifies where every visit came from, including AI referral traffic, referral sources, and Direct traffic that conventional analytics cannot explain.
Free to start. No session limits. No time cap.
Your analytics can tell you what happened. Can it tell you where it came from?
Referral information can be lost in transit. AI tools may not pass a usable referrer header. Campaign parameters can be stripped by privacy browsers. Visitors who decline consent banners become invisible to client-side analytics. The result is a growing fraction of traffic labelled Direct, Unknown, or simply missing.
Referrer Attribution preserves and interprets the attribution signals that are available before they disappear. It runs server-side, before any blocker or privacy mechanism can interfere, reading the referrer header and URL parameters at the moment the HTTP request arrives. What traffic attribution analytics means and why it matters →
See the AI traffic reaching your website
AI tools are sending visitors to websites at a scale that was not possible two years ago. ChatGPT cites a source. Perplexity includes a link. Claude references a page. Gemini surfaces a result. When the user clicks, the visit arrives with a referrer header that standard analytics channels often misclassify as Direct or generic Referral.
Referrer Attribution classifies AI-originated traffic as its own channel using a built-in taxonomy of 19 AI platforms. Where an AI tool passes a usable referrer, that visit is identified and attributed correctly. Where no referrer is available, the tool does not claim to identify traffic it cannot see.
AI traffic attribution: how it works and what you can see →Understand the source behind every visit
Referrer Attribution classifies every session into one of nine source channels. The objective is not traffic counting. It is source attribution: a clear account of where each visit came from, regardless of whether the visitor accepted a cookie banner, used an ad blocker, or arrived from an AI tool with no UTM parameters.
AI Referrer
Traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and 15+ other AI platforms identified by referrer domain. Learn more →
Organic Search
Visits arriving from Google, Bing, and other search engines via unpaid listings.
Referral
Traffic arriving from another website that links to yours, identified by the referring domain. Learn more →
Visits from email campaigns and newsletter links, identified by UTM medium or known mail service headers.
Paid Search
Paid search campaign traffic, identified by UTM parameters.
Paid Display
Display and banner advertising traffic, separated from paid search.
Campaign
UTM-tagged campaign traffic from any channel not otherwise classified. Learn more →
Social Media
Traffic from social networks, identified by referrer domain.
Direct
Sessions arriving with no referrer and no campaign parameters. Can include AI traffic, dark social, and other sources with no identifying signal. Learn more →
Attribution your existing analytics may not preserve
Analytics platforms tell you what happened on your site: pages viewed, time on page, events triggered, conversions recorded. Referrer Attribution answers a different question: where did this visitor come from?
The two are complementary. Referrer Attribution is the attribution layer, not a replacement for your analytics platform. It captures sessions that client-side analytics miss entirely (ad blocker users, consent-decliners, privacy browser users, sessions where the tracking pixel does not fire) and classifies AI traffic that GA4 currently folds into Direct.
Your analytics tells you what happened. Referrer Attribution helps explain where the visitor came from.
Attribution use cases
AI traffic attribution
Determine whether AI systems are sending visitors to your site and what those visitors do when they arrive.
Direct traffic investigation
Investigate the fraction of Direct traffic that probably has an identifiable source. The AIR Engine evaluates 20 pattern rules to surface probable explanations.
Referral attribution
Identify which websites are referring visitors and how that referral traffic behaves compared to other channels.
Campaign attribution
Preserve campaign parameters across privacy browsers and build links that survive Safari ITP and Brave stripping.
WordPress attribution
Add attribution intelligence directly to WordPress with a plugin that installs in two minutes and requires no server configuration.
Standalone attribution
Use the standalone PHP implementation where WordPress is not the runtime. Installs alongside any website with one script tag.
Traffic attribution for WordPress
CQI Referrer Attribution brings the same attribution architecture directly into WordPress. It installs from the WordPress.org repository, requires no server configuration, and begins classifying sessions immediately on activation.
The free plugin includes the full nine-channel classification, Session Journey, AI Referrer Taxonomy, live session counter, and channel breakdown dashboard. Pro adds tagging, trend charts, conversion tracking, the AIR Engine, and more.
Attribution for websites beyond WordPress
Refer App is the standalone implementation of the same attribution architecture. It runs as a self-contained PHP application alongside any website: static HTML, Next.js, Shopify, a custom CMS, or any platform where WordPress is not the runtime.
One script tag. No changes to your existing site files. The same nine-channel classification, AI Referrer Taxonomy, and Pro features available in the WordPress plugin.
Free attribution tools
Browser-based tools for understanding, preserving, and improving website traffic attribution. No sign-up required.
First-party attribution under your control
Both products are self-hosted. Attribution data lives on your server in your database. No session data is sent to any third-party server. Both use a first-party functional cookie containing only a random session token, no personal data. In standard deployments, no consent banner is required for the attribution functionality alone.
How server-side attribution relates to consent requirements →
Common questions
What is traffic attribution analytics?
Why does AI traffic need separate attribution?
Which product is right for my site?
Does this require a consent banner?
Where is attribution data stored?
Is there a free tier?
Know where your traffic actually comes from.
Analytics tells you what happened. Attribution tells you where it came from.
Free to start. No session limits. No time cap on the free tier.