"Social," in dark blue, captures all of the major social networking platforms as referring domains. For some of these platforms, additional detail is available. Under "sources" are the URLs that drove traffic to your site, but only a few social platforms share this information, notably Reddit. The "Search" category, in golden yellow, covers traffic from search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing. Parse.ly captures data from over 30 different search engines. Aggregator traffic, in maroon, comes from content aggregators such as Google News, Google Discover, Flipboard, and Newsbreak. Internal traffic, in sky blue, refers to any visits originating from within your own site's domain, including the homepage, in-article links, and links from a matching subdomain. High volumes of internal traffic on a specific post can sometimes be attributed to photo galleries or paginated content, but can also signal strong reader loyalty and engagement across the site.The "AI" category, in teal, captures traffic from AI-driven platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. The "Other" category, in forest green, captures any additional external referral sources not covered by the above categories. Most of the time these are other websites. Direct traffic, in gray, represents visits with no referrer data attached. This can occur when a user types a URL directly into their browser, clicks a bookmark, clicks a link through email, text messages, or an app, or uses a privacy-focused browser or search engine that strips out referrer information. There are also certain websites that do not send a referrer header. Most Parse.ly customers append UTM parameters to links to identify which direct traffic comes from email, push notifications, and other audience development efforts. You can learn more about UTM parameters in another video.

Identifying Referral Sources