---
title: "What is a Referrer Group ?"
description: "Learn what Referrer Group is and how each source category classifies your traffic."
url: https://help.knotch.com/en/articles/239-what-is-a-referrer-group
collection: "Filters & Custom Views"
updated: 2026-06-02
language: en
---

# What is a Referrer Group ?

Learn what Referrer Group is and how each source category classifies your traffic.

**Referrer Group** is a broad traffic-source categories used in the [Referrer filter.](https://help.knotch.com/en/articles/104-what-is-the-referrer-filter.md) 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.

## Available Referrer Group

### Search Organic

**Search Organic** includes unpaid traffic from search engines.

Examples may include traffic from:

-   Google
    
-   Bing
    
-   Yahoo
    

Use this group to analyze visitors who found your content through unpaid search results.

### Search Paid

**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

**Social Organic** includes unpaid traffic from social media platforms.

Examples may include visitors who clicked a link from an organic post on:

-   LinkedIn
    
-   Facebook
    
-   X
    
-   Instagram
    
-   Reddit
    

Use this group to understand how unpaid social distribution contributes to traffic.

### Social Paid

**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

**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

**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

**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

**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

**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

**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.

## Choosing the right level of analysis

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.

## Example

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.