hi,
is there a way to know if visitor who made an order came from Google or ChatGP or from direct link (or bookmark).
If we did not add a trafic analytic appli (cookie or url paramter) , maybe Shopify keep the data of history(-1) somewhere ?
I don’t know if Shopify is made with PHP/javascript language, but it might store the history-1 value…
Best regards
You can track the customer source via the analytics.
you mean “google analytics” if i add a tag ? or shopify already have such "feature ? (in basic plan)
Shopify already have this feature in Basic plan.
Hi, you can use Explorations in GA4 to measure traffic from AI sources to your pages.
Here is a step-by-step guide:
chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|bard\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|bing\.com|claude\.ai|anthropic\.com|deepseek\.com
Hope this helps 
If you want to see where a customer came from for an individual order, open up the order. In the right sidebar there’s a conversion summary block. Just click on the blue link that says “View conversion details” and it will tell you where the user came from.
If the user is from ChatGPT it will say it’s from ChatGPT. If it’s from Google it will say it’s from Google.
Then click on the button “View full sessions” for full details.
Good answers above. A few additions on the AI traffic side specifically.
Shopify’s built-in conversion summary (as ri31 shows) will surface ChatGPT as a source when the referrer is passed. The gap is that many AI engine clicks do not pass a referrer cleanly, so you can get sessions showing as direct or unknown when they actually came from an AI answer. This is a known attribution gap across GA4 and Shopify analytics.
The more reliable signal for AI traffic is your server logs or Cloudflare analytics. Look for user agents like ChatGPT-User (browsing mode clicks), OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended (Gemini). These confirm AI engines crawled or clicked your pages even when the session attribution gets lost.
For the conversational side (was my store cited in a ChatGPT answer), there is currently no direct tracking equivalent to Search Console. The approach is to run structured test prompts for your product category periodically and track whether your store appears. That is prompt-based monitoring rather than analytics tracking. Not perfect but it is the only current method for measuring AI citation visibility rather than just AI referral traffic.
shopify’s built-in analytics will show you the referrer for each session under Analytics > Reports > Sessions by referrer. traffic from ChatGPT usually shows up as “chatgpt.com” or “chat.openai.com” in the referrer, and Perplexity shows as “perplexity.ai.” direct traffic could be bookmarks, typed URLs, or AI chat links that strip the referrer header.
if you want cleaner data without adding a third-party app, UTM parameters on any links you share will help. but for organic AI referrals (where someone asks ChatGPT “where can i buy X” and it links to your store), the referrer header is really your only signal. Google Analytics 4 handles this better than Shopify’s native reports if you want to build a proper channel breakdown that separates AI from traditional search.
Building on the referrer-gap point, the cleanest fix I’ve seen is a custom pixel that captures document.referrer + sessionStorage.set on the very first page view, then re-attributes downstream pages to that source. ChatGPT in particular often strips referrer after one redirect, so without that first-touch capture you lose attribution. The Shopify built-in conversion summary catches it sometimes but only for direct-link clicks, not the link-preview hop. If you control your llms.txt or AI-targeted content, UTM tagging the URLs that AI engines crawl is also a reliable workaround until referrer pass-through gets standardized.
