Google Analytics
Connecting a Google Analytics 4 property lets Fond show you how many visits answer engines send to your site — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and others — along with the pages those visitors land on. You will find it under Analytics → AI Traffic for the website you connect.
Fond reads your Analytics data. It never writes to it, and it never changes anything in your Analytics account.
Before you start
You need Viewer access or better on the GA4 property that measures the website you are connecting. If you are not sure whether you have it, open Google Analytics and check that you can see the property's reports.
You do not need to install anything, change your site, or add a tag. If GA4 is already measuring your site, Fond can read it.
Connect it
- Open your website in Fond and find the Google Analytics card.
- Click Connect Google Analytics. Google asks you to sign in and to approve read-only access to your Analytics data.
- Pick the property that measures this website, and confirm which of its streams is the site Fond is tracking.
That last step matters more than it looks. See below.
This is separate from Merchant Center
If you have also connected Google Merchant Center, that is a different permission, granted separately. Connecting or disconnecting one does not affect the other, even when both use the same Google account.
Choosing the right property
This is where connections most often go wrong, and the failure is quiet: the connection succeeds, and the panel simply stays empty.
Sign in with the right Google account. If you sign in with a personal account rather than the one that has access to your business's Analytics, Google will show you no properties at all, or the wrong ones. The account you authorised is shown on the picker screen. If it is not the right one, start again and choose a different account.
A property is not always one website. A single GA4 property can measure several things at once: your website, an iOS app, a staging site, or several brands. That is why Fond asks you to confirm a stream hostname after you pick the property. Fond then counts only the traffic to that hostname.
Get this wrong and the panel will show numbers, but they will be somebody else's. The property name, its ID and its time zone are shown on the From Google Analytics panel at all times so you can check the connection is the one you meant.
What you will see, and when
Right after connecting the panel is empty, and that is expected. Fond's first read runs with the next morning's refresh. If you would rather not wait, use Sync now on the Google Analytics card and the first data arrives in a few minutes.
That first read covers up to the last 90 days, so you get history rather than a single day. If your property is newer than that, or the tag was installed recently, Fond can only show data back to when Analytics started collecting: Google keeps nothing from before the tag existed.
After that, Fond refreshes every day, at around 07:00 UTC. That is the morning in Europe, overnight in the Americas, and late afternoon in Asia and Australia, so check the clock before concluding a refresh is late.
The last three days keep changing. Google is still finalising recent data, so those figures move for up to about 72 hours. Those days ARE included in the totals you see, and the panel labels the figure as still moving rather than quietly holding it back. If you are about to quote a number to somebody, pick a range that ends before the last three days.
Days are counted in your property's time zone, not Fond's. That is the same boundary Google uses, so Fond's numbers reconcile against your own Analytics reports.
Zero is a real answer
If the panel says you had no visits from answer engines, that is usually a measurement, not a fault. Newer brands and smaller stores often start at or near zero because the models have not learned the brand well enough to recommend it yet. That is the situation the rest of Fond exists to change.
A zero here does not mean AI is ignoring you. Fond's Citations data samples answer engines directly and has no such blind spot, so it will show you where you are being mentioned even when nobody has clicked through yet.
What Fond cannot see
This is a limit of the whole category, not of Fond, and it is worth understanding before you read the number.
When somebody clicks a link on a web page, the browser tells your site where they came from. That is how every AI traffic number in every tool is built.
Clicks from inside a desktop or mobile app do not send that information. When someone taps a link in the ChatGPT or Perplexity app, the operating system hands the address to the browser with no record of the app it came from. The visit still arrives; it just arrives anonymous, and lands in the "direct" bucket alongside bookmarks and typed addresses.
The practical consequences:
- An engine that tags its own links is still counted, because that tag travels in the address rather than in the referrer. ChatGPT does this today, and it is the largest source of AI referral traffic by some margin, which limits the damage. Treat that as how things stand rather than a guarantee: it is the engine's choice, not something Fond controls or can promise.
- Engines that do not tag go dark in their apps, which today means Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot. Their web traffic is counted normally.
- Fond will not guess. Some tools imply a share of your direct traffic was really AI. Fond does not, because that share is genuinely unknowable, and inventing it would make the honest number look less trustworthy than the invented one.
So read the figure as a floor, not a total: at least this many visits came from answer engines.
Which engines are counted
Fond counts a visit as coming from an answer engine in two ways. It recognises the engines by name, and it also honours Google's own labelling: when Analytics marks a visit as coming from an AI assistant, Fond counts it even if the engine is one nobody has seen before. New engines therefore show up on their own, grouped as "Other AI assistant" until they are named.
Disconnecting
Disconnecting stops Fond reading your Analytics data. Your collected history is kept, and it comes back if you reconnect later, so disconnecting for a while does not cost you your trend.
One exception worth knowing: if you reconnect and pick a different property or a different stream, the figures collected under the old one are cleared. They described a different site, so keeping them would silently mix two websites into one trend. Reconnecting to the same property as before keeps everything.
Deleting the website or closing your account removes the data outright, as you would expect.
Troubleshooting
"No Analytics properties found." The Google account you signed in with cannot read any GA4 property. Either it is the wrong account, or it has not been granted access. Ask an admin on your Analytics account to give it Viewer access, or reconnect using a different Google account.
The panel is empty right after connecting. This is the expected state, not a fault: the first read has not run yet. Use Sync now on the Google Analytics card, or wait for the next daily refresh.
It is still empty after the first sync. Now check the property name and stream hostname shown on the From Google Analytics panel against the site you expected. A property that measures a different site, or a stream that is not this website, produces numbers that are real but somebody else's, or none at all.
Do not reconnect to a different property just to see whether it helps. Changing the property or stream deletes the data collected under the old one, and if the original was right you have thrown away the history rather than fixed anything. Confirm the names first, then change.
Nothing arrives for a full day. Check the Google Analytics card for a sync error. Fond also emails you when a connection stops working.
Fond asks you to reconnect, and keeps asking. While Fond's Google app is completing Google's verification review, Google expires every connection after seven days, for every app in that state and every account. So you will be asked to reconnect weekly until that review clears. It is not a fault, and it is not something you did.
Reconnecting takes a few seconds and your history is untouched, as long as you reconnect to the same property. Fond also emails you when a connection needs attention, so you do not have to watch the card.