Marketing analytics and proper attribution are getting 🥀 Another trend I’ve been noticing lately is that traditional marketing analytics is becoming less and less reliable. First, user behavior itself is much more complex now. A funnel where someone sees a post on X, Googles the product, compares options with AI, reads Reddit reviews, and then shows up as Direct or Organic is completely normal today. And on top of that, we now have AI traffic and all the instability that comes with it. Here’s a fresh example: In October, ChatGPT stopped passing utm_source and referrer data properly for a few days. In GA4, it looked like ChatGPT traffic had suddenly dropped by 22–57%, while in reality a significant share of those visits had simply moved into Direct. Plus, more than half of web traffic is now bots, which means standard traffic numbers are becoming less and less representative of actual human behavior. So in 2026, it’s already risky to look at one dashboard and conclude that “this channel is growing” or “this channel is dead.” You need to look at multiple signals at once: direct traffic, brand search, MMM, actual LLM answers, and conversions. And honestly, the good old “How did you hear about us?” question is starting to look less ugly every day :)