If you have looked at your analytics or your browser address bar recently and seen ?utm_source=chatgpt.com stuck on the end of a URL, here is the short answer: somebody clicked a link inside ChatGPT to reach that page. The parameter is a tracking tag ChatGPT appends to its outbound links so that website owners can tell ChatGPT-referred visits apart from everything else.
The longer answer is more useful, because in October 2026 this parameter broke for a week, came back, and acquired a sibling — utm_medium=feed — that tells you something quite different about where the visitor came from.
Key takeaways
utm_source=chatgpt.commeans the visit came from a link clicked inside ChatGPT. It does not mean ChatGPT crawled you, scraped you, or ran an ad for you.- In our 21 October test, 96 of 97 outbound links carried it.
utm_medium=feedon top of it means the link came from a merchant product catalogue submitted to OpenAI, not from a crawled web page. In our test, 17 links carried it.- Between 8 and 15 October 2026 the parameter went missing. Visits from ChatGPT were logged as direct traffic. OpenAI confirmed a bug and fixed it on 15 October.
- Referrer is still not reliable, parameter or not: button-style entry points are opened with
noreferrer. - If you are a reader seeing this in your own address bar, it is harmless and you can delete everything from the
?onward.
What the parameter actually is
UTM parameters are a twenty-year-old convention for tagging inbound links so an analytics tool can group them. They are added by whoever creates the link, and they travel in the URL. utm_source names where the click came from.
So https://www.example.com/product/?utm_source=chatgpt.com decodes as: this visitor arrived by clicking a link that ChatGPT put in an answer.
Hovering a text buy link in a ChatGPT answer shows you the destination with the parameter attached — in the screenshot above, https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/?utm_s…, truncated by the hover card. Note that this only works for text links. Black buy buttons are buttons, not hyperlinks: you cannot hover them, and their context menu has no "Copy Link Address". We cover that distinction in the "Shop at" button.
