Channels

Every anonymous visit and every first touch gets one channel: a coarse answer to “where did this come from?”. Vevee derives it on the server from three inputs: utm_source, utm_medium and the referrer host. A channel sent by your app is ignored, so the grouping is the same for every app.

There are seven channels:

Channel	Meaning
`paid`	Ads you pay for.
`email`	Newsletters and email clients.
`ai`	AI assistants and AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot).
`organic_search`	Unpaid search engine results.
`social`	Social networks, unpaid.
`referral`	Any other site, or tags that match no rule above.
`direct`	No referrer and no tags.

The channel appears as the channel visit field (Traffic page, visit splits) and as the first_channel person property (person splits). See Cookieless traffic attribution and Funnel splits.

How the inputs are normalized

All three values are trimmed and lower-cased. Empty values count as missing.
The referrer host loses a port and any leading www., m., l. or lm., repeatedly. So m.facebook.com, l.facebook.com and www.facebook.com all read as facebook.com.
A utm_source matches a known site by its full name (chatgpt.com) or by the name without its last label (chatgpt, facebook). One-letter names such as x and t are not matched this way.

The rules, in order

The first rule that matches wins.

1. paid

utm_medium is one of cpc, ppc, paid, paid_social, display, ads; or
the referrer host is googleadservices.com or doubleclick.net; or
utm_source is adwords or google_ads.

2. email

utm_medium is email; or
the referrer host is mail.google.com, outlook.live.com, outlook.office.com, mail.yahoo.com or mail.proton.me.

3. ai

The referrer host is chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, claude.ai or copilot.microsoft.com; or
utm_source matches one of those sites (for example chatgpt.com or perplexity).

4. organic_search

The referrer host is google with any country domain (google.com, google.it, google.co.uk), bing.com, duckduckgo.com, search.brave.com, com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox, or any yahoo or ecosia domain including subdomains (search.yahoo.com); or
utm_source is google, bing, duckduckgo, yahoo or ecosia, or matches one of the search hosts above.

utm_medium is social; or
the referrer host is facebook.com, instagram.com, t.co, x.com, twitter.com, tiktok.com, youtube.com, linkedin.com, lnkd.in, reddit.com, out.reddit.com, threads.net, or any pinterest domain; or
utm_source matches one of those sites (facebook, linkedin, reddit), or is one of the aliases fb, ig, instagram, an, msg, meta, tt, tiktok, pinterest.

6. referral

Anything left with a referrer host, a utm_source or a utm_medium. An unknown site, or tags that match none of the rules above.

7. direct

No referrer host and no UTM tags at all.

Examples

Landing URL tags	Referrer host	Channel
`utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social`	(any)	`paid`
`utm_source=facebook`	(none)	`social`
`utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social`	(none)	`social` (the hyphen is not a paid medium)
(none)	`l.instagram.com`	`social`
`utm_source=chatgpt.com`	(none)	`ai`
(none)	`www.google.co.uk`	`organic_search`
`utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email`	(none)	`email`
(none)	`news.ycombinator.com`	`referral`
`utm_campaign=launch` only	(none)	`direct` (campaign is not an input)
(none)	(none)	`direct`

Tag your ads with a paid medium. A paid campaign tagged only with utm_source=facebook is grouped as social. Add utm_medium=cpc, paid or paid_social (exactly, with an underscore) so it lands under paid. The campaign name itself stays available as utm_campaign on the Traffic page and in splits.

Where the channel is computed

Anonymous events on /api/v1-13/capture: from the visit fields carried in properties. See capture().
First touch: once, when identify() runs with isSignup: true. Stored as first_channel and never recomputed.