Referrer Group is a broad traffic-source categories used in the Referrer filter. They help you understand the type of source that brought visitors to your site or content.
Instead of analyzing each individual referrer domain or URL separately, Referrer Groups let you group traffic into common channel categories, such as organic search, paid social, email, or direct traffic.
Search Organic includes unpaid traffic from search engines.
Examples may include traffic from:
Bing
Yahoo
Use this group to analyze visitors who found your content through unpaid search results.
Search Paid includes traffic from paid search advertising.
Examples may include traffic from:
Google Ads
Microsoft Advertising
Other paid search campaigns
Use this group to analyze traffic driven by paid search investments.
Social Organic includes unpaid traffic from social media platforms.
Examples may include visitors who clicked a link from an organic post on:
X
Use this group to understand how unpaid social distribution contributes to traffic.
Social Paid includes traffic from paid social media campaigns.
Examples may include paid traffic from:
LinkedIn Ads
Meta Ads
X Ads
Reddit Ads
Use this group to analyze the performance of paid social promotion.
Display Paid includes traffic from display advertising.
Examples may include traffic from:
Banner ads
Programmatic campaigns
Sponsored display placements
Use this group to evaluate traffic from paid display media.
Direct / None includes visits where no referrer was detected.
This can happen when a visitor:
Types the URL directly into their browser
Uses a bookmark
Opens a link from a source that does not pass referrer data
Arrives from a source where referrer data was stripped or unavailable
Direct / None does not always mean the visitor manually typed the URL. It means Knotch One did not receive a detectable referrer for that visit.
External includes visitors who arrived from another website that does not fall into a more specific Referrer Group, such as search, social, email, or paid media.
Examples may include traffic from:
Partner websites
Press articles
Industry blogs
Customer or vendor sites
Use this group to understand traffic from third-party websites outside your owned properties and standard marketing channels.
Internal includes visitors who arrived from another page on your own site.
Use this group to analyze traffic that moves between pages, sections, or content experiences within your owned web properties.
Email includes visitors from email campaigns.
Examples may include traffic from:
Newsletters
Promotional sends
Lifecycle emails
Nurture campaigns
Customer communications
Use this group to understand how email contributes to content engagement and conversions.
AI Search includes traffic from generative AI platforms when those platforms are detectable as the referrer.
Examples may include traffic from:
ChatGPT
Gemini
Claude
Use this group to analyze traffic from AI-powered discovery experiences.
Use Referrer Group when you want to compare broad channels.
Use Referrer Domain when you want to understand the specific website sending traffic.
Use Referrer URL when you need the full source path or campaign-level detail.
Use Tracking Code when you want to analyze traffic by UTM values or other custom parameters.
To compare how organic search and paid search are performing, select Search Organic and Search Paid from the Referrer Group tab.
To focus only on organic Google traffic, select Search Organic from Referrer Group and google.com from Referrer Domain.
