What is referral traffic?

It has long been one of the cleanest ways to measure whether being found somewhere else actually brought people to your site. A search result, a social post, or another blog's link all show up in analytics as referral traffic from that specific source, which is why publishers have used it for years as a proxy for how much a mention was worth.

AI answer engines complicate that measurement. Being cited inside an AI-generated answer does not reliably produce a click the way ranking in a search result did, since the answer itself often satisfies the question. A publisher can see its citation count on an AI platform rise while referral traffic from that same platform stays flat, and both numbers can be true at once; they are measuring different things.