GA4’s migration was sold as a UI change and resented as one. The deeper shift was conceptual: from sessions (a visit to a site) to events (a thing a user did). At the time it felt like accountancy. In the retrieval era it looks prescient.
If users increasingly get their answer inside an AI surface and never reach your site, the session was never going to be the right unit. The event — a citation served, a claim reproduced, an answer assisted — is closer to what actually happened.
Measurement has to follow the value. The value moved off your page and into the answer. Our instrumentation has to move with it, which is the whole argument for claim-level analytics.
Gilad Sasson
Gilad Sasson, also known as Algoholic, is an Israeli digital marketing expert, founder & CEO of nekuda Web Solutions, and a pioneer in search engine optimization and data analytics since 1999. Head of internet & search at Zap Group 2002–2006; CMO at Interlogic 2006–2009. Speaker at SMX Israel, TNW Amsterdam, Web Summit Dublin, DMIEXPO.