Gemini Quietly Stops Adding UTM Parameters to Cited Links

Google quietly stopped adding utm_source=gemini tracking parameters to links cited in Gemini's answers around late September, Search Engine Roundtable reported on October 30. The parameter started appearing in early September and grew steadily for about three weeks before vanishing overnight around September 28. Google has made no official statement about either adding or removing it.

The change was first spotted by SEO analyst Natzir, who shared a chart tracking the parameter's volume on X. Another user, Xyborg, reported seeing the same shift around the same time. Google's John Mueller had commented on Reddit about a month earlier that he'd seen the parameter on Gemini links, but he did not address this latest change.

Natzir said the desktop web version of Gemini still consistently passes a gemini.google.com referrer. The problem is the iOS Gemini app, which opens cited links in its own in-app browser and passes no referrer at all, so these visits land as "Direct" traffic in Google Analytics. The only trace left in server logs is a user agent string reading GeminiiOS.

Even during the three weeks the UTM tag was active, it only applied to links opened from the desktop web version, not visits from the iOS app. In other words, even with the tag in place, filtering Gemini-driven traffic cleanly out of analytics was never fully possible. That's partly why many site operators have treated the server-log user agent string as a more reliable clue than the UTM value.

This episode is a reminder that the same thing could easily happen with other AI assistants like ChatGPT or Perplexity. As long as AI companies don't disclose when or why they add or remove tracking parameters, cleanly measuring traffic from any single AI assistant through analytics numbers alone is likely to stay difficult.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable, October 30, 2026. Checked October 30, 2026. Read the original