Clicks vs Human Visits: What's the Difference?
How to read the Clicks and Human Visits metrics in your Mersel AI analytics dashboard, and why the distinction matters.
Mersel AI Team
5 min read
If you're looking at your Mersel analytics dashboard, you'll notice two metrics that sound similar but mean very different things: Clicks and Human Visits. Understanding the difference is key to making sense of your AI analytics.
The Short Answer
- Human Visits = all real people visiting your website, from any source
- Clicks = only those people who arrived at your website by clicking a link in an AI answer
Clicks are a subset of Human Visits. Every Click is a Human Visit, but not every Human Visit is a Click.
What Are Human Visits?
Human Visits is the total count of real people who visited your website. It includes everyone, regardless of how they found you:
- Someone typed your URL directly into their browser
- Someone found you through a Google search
- Someone clicked a link on social media
- Someone clicked a link in an email newsletter
- Someone clicked a link in a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer
- Someone followed a link from another website
All of these count as Human Visits. It's the broadest measure of real human traffic to your site.
What Are Clicks?
Clicks is a much more specific metric. It only counts people who arrived at your website by clicking a link inside an AI answer engine's response, from platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot.
Here's how a Click happens:
- A person asks an AI platform a question, for example: "What are the best running shoes for beginners?"
- The AI platform visits your website to gather information (this is an Agent Visit)
- The AI generates an answer and includes a link to your website
- The person reads the answer, finds it useful, and clicks the link to your site
- That click is counted as a Click in your Mersel dashboard
Clicks represent the real business value of AI visibility. They show that AI isn't just visiting your site, but actually sending real people to it.
How They Relate
Think of it as a simple breakdown:
Human Visits (everyone)
|-- Clicks (people who came from AI answer engines)
|-- Other Visits (people who came from Google, social media, direct, etc.)
For example, if your website had 1,000 Human Visits last week and 50 of those were Clicks:
- 1,000 real people visited your site in total
- 50 of those people specifically came from AI answer engines
- 950 came from all other sources combined
Why This Matters
Clicks tell you something that Human Visits alone can't: how much traffic AI is driving to your business.
This distinction matters more than ever. AI referral traffic to retail grew 4,700% year-over-year according to Adobe Digital Insights. And the visitors that come through AI aren't just browsing: ChatGPT referrals convert at 15.9% compared to 1.76% for Google organic search. That's a 9x difference in conversion rate.
If you're investing in making your content AI-friendly (which Mersel does automatically), Clicks is the metric that shows whether that investment is paying off. A growing number of Clicks means AI platforms aren't just reading your content but actively recommending it to users, and those users are interested enough to visit your site.
Where You'll See These Metrics
In your Mersel dashboard:
- Clicks appears as a KPI card on the Analytics Overview, Pages, and Dashboard pages. It shows the count of people who clicked through from AI answer engines during the selected time period.
- Human Visits appears in the Pages table and on the Platforms page. It shows total human traffic so you can compare AI-driven visits against your overall traffic.
The Connection to CTR
These two metrics come together in the Click-Through Rate (CTR) calculation:
Note that CTR uses Clicks (not Human Visits) in the formula. It measures what percentage of AI platform visits to your site resulted in a real person clicking through. A higher CTR means AI platforms are effectively driving real traffic to your business. For a deeper explanation, read Understanding CTR in AI Analytics.
Quick Reference
| Metric | What It Counts | Example Sources |
|---|---|---|
| Human Visits | All real people visiting your site | Google, direct, social media, AI engines, email, referrals |
| Clicks | Only people who came from AI answers | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot |
| Agent Visits | AI platform visits (not humans) | ChatGPT bot, Claude bot, Perplexity bot |
Key Takeaways
- Human Visits is your total human traffic. It tells you how many real people visited your site overall.
- Clicks is the AI-specific slice. It tells you how many visitors came specifically because an AI platform recommended your content.
- Clicks will always be smaller than Human Visits because it's a subset of the total.
- A growing Clicks number is a strong signal that AI platforms are actively driving value for your business.
Want to understand why AI visibility matters for your business? Read The Web Is Splitting in Two for the full picture.