Traffic sources and channels

The Sources card shows where your visits come from: the channel, the referrer, and AI assistants. Loomduct works this out from the first event of each visit.

Referrer

The referrer is the site the visitor came from. Loomduct keeps only its domain and path, never its query string.

• Links between www.example.com and example.com are part of your own site and are not referrers.
• Other subdomains are referrers: a link from blog.example.com to example.com counts as a referral.
• Well-known sites get a name, like Google, Reddit or ChatGPT. Other sites show their domain.

Campaign tags and ad click ids

Loomduct reads the campaign tags utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content from the page address. For ad click ids (gclid, gbraid, wbraid, msclkid, fbclid, ttclid, li_fat_id, twclid), it keeps only which one was there, never its value.

Without a referrer, a known utm_source sets the source: utm_source=twitter counts as Twitter.

Channels

Each visit gets one channel. The first rule that matches wins:

Channel	When
Paid search, Paid social or Other paid	utm_medium contains cp, is ppc or retargeting, or starts with paid, or there is an ad click id. Search sources and Google or Microsoft click ids make it Paid search; social sources and TikTok, LinkedIn or X click ids make it Paid social. fbclid alone does not make a visit paid.
Email	utm_medium or utm_source contains email, e-mail or newsletter.
Affiliates	utm_medium is affiliate.
Organic search	The source is a search engine.
Organic social	The source is a social network.
AI assistants	The source is an AI assistant.
Referral	Any other site.
Direct	No referrer and no known source.

AI assistants

Visits from AI assistants show in the AI tab of the Sources card. Loomduct knows ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Deepseek, Le Chat, Meta AI, NotebookLM, Poe and more.

Most AI apps and code editors send no referrer, so their visits count as Direct. Only visits from the web versions of these assistants show up as AI.