// VS GOOGLE ANALYTICS
The traffic GA4 was designed to filter out
This isn't a GA replacement. GA4 is excellent at what it's built for — measuring humans. By design it filters known bots and never fires on crawlers that don't run JavaScript. Tactical measures the exact segment GA4 excludes: AI crawlers, shopping agents, and the humans they refer.
01Side by side
| Dimension | Google Analytics 4 | Tactical |
|---|---|---|
| Known bots / crawlers | Filtered out by default (bot exclusion) | Classified and reported |
| AI crawlers that don't run JS | Never seen — no JavaScript fires | Detected server-side |
| Agent type (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude…) | No dimension for it | First-class dimension |
| Shopping-agent on-site behavior | Indistinguishable from a human hit | Scored behaviorally |
| AI referral source (chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai) | Lumped into 'referral' / 'direct' | Segmented per source |
| Buy-intent scoring per session | Not available | Discovery / evaluation / high-intent |
| AI-influenced revenue | Not attributed | Last-touch attributed (labeled estimated) |
02Why GA4 can't just show you this
Two structural reasons, neither of which is a GA flaw — they're GA working as intended:
- Bot filtering is on by default. GA4 excludes traffic from the IAB known-bots list, which is precisely the traffic an AEO story is about. What's noise to GA is the signal here.
- It's JavaScript-based. GA4 measures via a browser tag. Most AI retrieval crawlers fetch your HTML without executing JavaScript, so the tag never fires — they're invisible to any JS analytics, GA included.
03Run both
Keep GA4 for your human funnel. Add Tactical for the AI layer on top of it. They don't overlap — that's the point.