I checked my analytics and found half my traffic comes from places I never marketed on
I built NotionLock — it adds password protection to public Notion pages (the missing middle between "public to anyone" and "invite-only Notion account required").
I barely marketed it. No ads, no launch. I shipped it and put the link in my IH profile. Then ~18 people signed up on their own.
So I finally dug into my analytics, and the breakdown surprised me:
- ~36% of my traffic comes from Indie Hackers — from a single passive profile link I almost forgot I'd added
- ~18% comes from AI assistants — ChatGPT and Copilot literally recommending the tool to people asking "how do I password protect a Notion page"
- The rest is organic search + direct
The AI part is what blew my mind. Nobody submitted it there. They just started suggesting it. And those visitors convert way better than search.
But here's the humbling part: of those signups, only ~17% actually protected a page. Turns out my setup modals were showing in Italian to English-speaking users 🤦 — a silent friction killing activation right at the critical step. Just fixed it, now watching if the new signups convert better.
Two takeaways I keep coming back to:
- The channels that work are rarely the ones you optimize for. I obsessed over SEO; my best traffic came from a link I forgot about.
- Check your source/medium in GA4 for AI referrals — you might be getting "AEO" traffic and not know it.
Building in public from here. Curious: is anyone else seeing AI-assistant traffic show up in their analytics yet?
The AI traffic part resonates. Put llms.txt on our site a few weeks ago mostly as an experiment — started seeing referrals from ChatGPT for queries I never optimized for. Nobody submitted us, they just started recommending.
The activation point stings though. We had the same thing — users creating QR codes but never scanning to test before printing. One prompt fixed it. Analytics hides this stuff until you go looking.
The AI referral traffic point is underrated. Most builders are still optimizing for Google while ChatGPT is quietly sending qualified visitors who already know what they want. AEO is going to matter a lot more than SEO for niche tools in the next 12 months.
That hidden-source traffic is often the best clue for where to double down. For Kinetic Override, I'm seeing the same pattern: exact-intent surfaces around no-root Android auto clickers / macro recorders are much more useful than generic launch posts. The harder part is tracking which wording people actually used before they found you.
Interesting signal.
The thing I'd be careful with is not where the traffic came from.
It's whether the people arriving from those channels are actually succeeding for the same reason.
A surprising traffic source can send founders chasing the wrong lesson if the real bottleneck sits somewhere else in the path.
That's not a call I'd make casually from analytics alone.
If you want to try it: notionlock.com — free plan, no Notion account needed for viewers.