Why your AI-attributed traffic may have dropped from October 8 to 15, and what to do about it

Webflow reported that ChatGPT-attributed traffic to its site fell 56% between October 8 and 15, 2026, while customer sites using Webflow Optimize or Analyze saw an average decline of 47%; traffic from Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude was unaffected. The decline resulted from OpenAI removing the `utm_source=chatgpt.com` tag from inline ChatGPT citation links during the GPT-6 launch, causing analytics platforms that depend on UTM parameters to classify those visits as Direct or Unassigned rather than AI referrals. OpenAI restored the tags on October 15, returning attribution to normal. Webflow advises marketers to annotate this period as inaccurate in UTM-based analytics reports, recognize that corresponding increases in Direct traffic may represent misclassified ChatGPT visits, and avoid changing their AI-search strategies based on the apparent decline. The company also recommends tracking LLM referrals alongside direct traffic, gathering customer-source information through sales conversations, and monitoring brand visibility across multiple AI search tools as agentic search continues to evolve.

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