Kern Media® reports on the traffic, leads and revenue that Google and AI tools bring in, not just rankings. This page explains what we measure, where the numbers come from and what you’ll see in your monthly SEO, AEO and GEO report.
What’s in a Kern Media Monthly Report?
Every report follows the same structure, so you can compare one month to the next. It opens with a short summary of the month, then backs up each point with the data.
- Summary and updates: the month’s highlights for search performance, leads and AI visibility, plus the status of current projects
- Google Search Console trends: clicks and impressions for the last 16 months, the last 3 months vs. the same months last year, and the last 28 days vs. the 28 days before
- Keyword rankings: your top-impact keywords vs. last month and last year, plus long-term growth in Page 1 rankings and referring domains
- AI chatbot traffic: visits and leads from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and other AI tools, from a custom GA4 report
- Leads: form submissions by form type, from all channels and from organic search, vs. last month and last year
- The story behind the leads: which pages and channels the leads came from, so you can see what’s working
- Content: new and updated pages and blog posts, and which older posts we’re refreshing and why
- Technical health: sitemap indexation, Core Web Vitals and any technical issues we’re fixing
- Next steps: what we’re doing next and anything we need from your team
Your report comes as a Google Doc, and we talk it through on your monthly call. Looker Studio dashboards are available on request. Work in progress lives in a shared Google Sheet that shows what’s done, what’s in progress and what’s next.
Why Do You Report Where Each Lead Came From?
A lead count alone doesn’t tell you what to do next. So we look at where the leads started: the landing page, the channel and the form.
That’s how we spot patterns like this one. In one month for a B2B services client, all 6 leads from ChatGPT landed on a service or contact page, not a blog post. ChatGPT was sending buyers straight to the sales pages.
We also flag anything that affects a comparison, like a change in how leads are tracked, so a number never looks better or worse than it really is.
Why Is Google Search Console Your Source of Truth?
Google Search Console is Google’s own record of your clicks, impressions and average positions. SEO tools like Ahrefs estimate traffic with models, and those estimates have become less reliable since Google stopped supporting the num=100 search parameter in September 2025 and AI Overviews changed how often people click.
We still use Ahrefs every day for keyword research, competitor research and scheduled site crawls. We just don’t use its traffic estimates to judge your results. Since that change, Ahrefs only tracks rankings reliably on the first pages of Google, so when it shows a keyword as lost, we check it by hand before we report it.
When we compare periods, we compare like for like (the same weeks year over year, for example), so seasonality and long-term trends don’t get mistaken for wins or losses. For one B2B services client, a last-3-months vs. last-year comparison showed clicks up 36% (62.6K vs. 46K) and impressions up 81% (7.35M vs. 4.05M).
How Do You Track ChatGPT and AI Traffic in GA4?
By default, GA4 lumps AI tools into Referral, mixed in with every other website that links to you. We set up a custom channel group that pulls ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and other AI tools into their own channel, so you can see the sessions, leads and revenue each one sends.
Expect these numbers to run low. Some AI visits arrive without referral data and show up as Direct, so the AI channel is a floor, not the full total.
Tracking this way is how we can show results like this one: for a national eCommerce brand, revenue from AI tools grew about 7x (from $3,000 to $21,000, July 2 to September 29, 2026 vs. the prior 90 days), and revenue per ChatGPT visit rose from $1.05 to $6.33. See the case studies for details.
How Do You Measure AI Visibility?
We track a fixed set of real buyer prompts with AI prompt tracking tools, grouped by buyer persona and AI engine, and test prompts directly in the AI tools themselves. That shows how often AI tools mention and recommend your brand, where you rank in the answer, which competitors come up instead and which sources get cited.
We start with ChatGPT, since it sends most of the AI referral traffic we see in client GA4 reports, and add other AI tools on request. Each one is reported separately, because they rarely agree.
AI answers change by user, model and day, so we look at trends across many prompts rather than any single answer. Personas matter most: our AI search citation study of 1,044 AI answers found visibility can swing by up to 80 points depending on which buyer persona is asking, but only about 7 points based on how the question is worded.
For one travel company, this tracking showed the brand going from 0% to 35% of tracked AI answers across 80 trip-planning prompts, and from the #8 to the #2 most-mentioned brand out of 118.
How Do You Measure ROI When AI Overviews Reduce Clicks?
Across the industry, Google’s AI Overviews answer more questions right on the results page, so a page can rank as well as before (or better) and still get fewer clicks. That’s a change on Google’s side, and it’s why we never judge success by clicks alone.
We look at leads and revenue from organic search and AI tools, your visibility inside AI answers and AI Overviews, and how your commercial pages (product, service and pricing pages) perform. When informational clicks shrink, we adjust the strategy to drive new growth: creating new content or updating existing pages to target true content gaps for Google keywords and AI search prompts.
What Do You Tell Leadership When Traffic Drops?
After a traffic drop, we write a short summary your team can share with leadership: what dropped, when, why and what we’re doing about it. It separates real losses from measurement noise and from long-term trends, and it’s written in plain English for an executive audience.
If you’re dealing with a drop now, see our traffic recovery service.
What Don’t You Report On?
Rankings are in every report, but always next to the clicks, leads and revenue they bring in. We don’t report vanity numbers on their own, like rankings for keywords nobody searches or traffic estimates from third-party tools, because they don’t tell you whether the work is paying off.
Measurement and Reporting FAQs
How often do you report?
Every month. Your report comes as a Google Doc, and we walk through it on your monthly call.
Do you offer dashboards?
Yes. Looker Studio dashboards are available on request, alongside the monthly Google Doc report.
Can you track traffic and sales from ChatGPT?
Yes. We set up a custom channel group in GA4 that separates ChatGPT and other AI tools from regular referral traffic, so you can see the sessions, leads and revenue each one sends. These numbers run low, since some AI visits arrive without referral data and show up as Direct.
Which AI tools do you track?
We start with ChatGPT, since it sends most of the AI referral traffic we see in client GA4 reports. Other AI tools, such as Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Mode, can be added on request, and we report each one separately.
Why do your numbers differ from Ahrefs or Semrush?
Those tools estimate traffic from models. Google Search Console shows Google’s own data for your clicks, impressions and positions, so we use it as our source of truth and use Ahrefs for keyword and competitor research.
On a free 30-minute call, we’ll look at your goals and your current Google and AI visibility, and talk through what we’d measure and report each month.
See Working With Kern Media, our AI visibility audit or our pricing.
