Channels

Every session is classified once, from its entry pageview: the referrer and the query string of the first page of the visit. Later navigations inside your site are internal and never change the answer.

The rules are checked in this order, and the first match wins.

1. Paid

Any of these click ids in the URL:

gclid  gbraid  wbraid  fbclid  msclkid  ttclid  twclid  li_fat_id  dclid

…or a utm_medium of cpc, ppc, paid, paidsocial, paid_social, display, cpm, banner, or anything starting with paid.

Paid is checked first on purpose: an ad on Google is paid traffic, not search.

2. Email

utm_medium of email, e-mail or newsletter, a utm_source of newsletter, a referrer from a known mail host, or any host beginning mail.

3. AI assistants

A referrer from an assistant, or a utm_source that names one:

chatgpt.com  chat.openai.com  openai.com  perplexity.ai  claude.ai
gemini.google.com  copilot.microsoft.com  you.com  phind.com  poe.com
deepseek.com  grok.com  meta.ai  chat.mistral.ai  kagi.com/assistant

AI is checked before search, so a visit from Gemini is an assistant rather than Google.

This is people arriving from an assistant. Robots reading your pages to build an answer are a different thing, in the AI crawlers module.

4. Search

A referrer from a search engine — Google in every country, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Baidu, Yandex, Brave, Startpage, Qwant, Naver, Seznam, Kagi — or utm_medium=organic.

5. Social

A referrer from a social host, utm_medium=social, or a utm_source that names one. The list is deliberately broad, and includes the places developers actually share things: Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon instances, Discord, Telegram, dev.to, Substack, Indie Hackers and GitHub.

6. Referral

Any other referrer, or a utm_source, or a ?ref= parameter.

7. Direct

Nothing to go on: a typed address, a bookmark, an app, or a browser that sent no referrer.

Direct is not a compliment. On a link shared in a private message or a PDF, the browser sends no referrer, so it lands here.

Returning from checkout is not a referral

Payment hosts are never counted as referrers:

checkout.stripe.com  buy.stripe.com  billing.stripe.com  pay.stripe.com
lemonsqueezy.com  polar.sh  paddle.com  dodopayments.com  paypal.com

Without this, every paying customer would look like a referral from Stripe, and the source that actually earned the sale would lose the credit.

Campaigns

All five UTM parameters are recorded — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content — and shown on the Campaigns tab. Everything else in a query string is dropped before storage (click ids only mark the visit as Paid), so a session id or an email address in a URL never reaches the database.