Google Analytics AI: Ask GA4 Questions in Plain English

GA4 holds the answers to most traffic questions behind an interface built for exploration. The way in is a few well-defined metrics and an awareness of which numbers cannot be added.

By Ed · Published October 25, 2026 · 8 min read

Twenty-five years starting companies, consulting, owning a multi-million-dollar P&L and leading business intelligence for large enterprises.

You can ask GA4 questions in plain English if the tool answering reads your real GA4 data and calculates totals correctly. The one trap specific to GA4 is that users cannot be added across days or months, so a good answer treats users separately from sessions, key events and revenue, which do add up.

If you are after a recurring deliverable rather than ad hoc answers, the GA4 report guide covers what to include. This post is about getting quick answers.

Why GA4 answers take longer than they should

GA4's Reports section is built around a handful of fixed views. Anything more specific, such as revenue by channel for each month this year, sends you into Explorations, where you choose dimensions, metrics, a technique, segments and filters before you see a number. It is powerful and slow, and it is easy to misconfigure. The questions you actually have are usually simpler than the tool assumes.

Which GA4 numbers add up

This is the part most worth learning. Metrics fall into two groups.

Additive: sessions, engaged sessions, new users, page views, key events, purchases, revenue. Add them across days, channels or landing pages and the total is correct.
Not additive: total users. A person who visits in three different months is one user per month and one for the quarter. Summing monthly users overstates the audience.

Rates follow the same rule as in ad reporting: sum first, then divide. Engagement rate is summed engaged sessions divided by summed sessions. Key events per session is summed key events divided by summed sessions. Averaging daily percentages gives a number that treats a 50-session day like a 5,000-session day.

The questions worth asking

How many sessions did each channel send every month this year?
Which channel has the best engagement rate, and how many sessions is that based on?
What was revenue by channel last quarter, and how many purchases produced it?
Which landing pages brought the most key events last month?
Did organic sessions fall because of fewer visits or because a specific landing page lost traffic?
How many users did we have each month?

Notice that most of these pair a rate or a total with its volume. Engagement rate from 40 sessions is not a finding; from 40,000 it is.

A word on channels

GA4 assigns each session to a default channel group such as Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search, Paid Social, Email or Referral, using rules based on source and medium. Two cautions. First, the grouping depends on correct UTM tagging, so untagged email or social traffic can land in Direct. Second, the Paid Search group includes any search ads with proper tagging, not only Google. Treat the channel breakdown as a sorted view of your traffic, not an audit.

How Quiriz answers GA4 questions

Quiriz has a Google Analytics connector, in beta. Sign in with Google, choose one GA4 property, and Quiriz reads 13 months into datasets that refresh daily, read-only and included in paid plans. Three datasets:

Daily traffic: sessions, engaged sessions, new users, page views, key events, purchases and revenue by day and default channel group, in the property's time zone.
Monthly users: total users, new users and sessions per calendar month, kept separate because users cannot be added across months.
Landing pages by month: sessions, engaged sessions, key events and revenue for the top 5,000 landing pages each month.

Metrics are defined once: Google Analytics sessions, engaged sessions, new users, key events, purchases, revenue, engagement rate and key events per session. There is deliberately no summed users metric, so a quarter-level users question is answered from the monthly dataset with the caveat attached. Example questions:

"How many sessions did we get from each channel every month this year?"
"Which landing pages brought the most key events last month?"
"What was our revenue by channel last quarter?"

An illustrative example: a traffic drop

Say sessions fell 18 percent quarter over quarter (example figures). Ask three questions in order: which channel group lost the most sessions, whether engagement rate changed in that channel, and which landing pages lost the most sessions. If Organic Search accounts for most of the loss and a handful of landing pages account for most of that, you have a content or ranking story rather than a site-wide problem. If the loss is spread across every channel at once, suspect tracking, a consent change or a site outage before you suspect demand. Each answer is a short table, and the sequence takes minutes. The skill is the order of questions, and it works the same in any tool.

What it cannot see

No source or medium, no campaign. Traffic is broken down by default channel group, not by individual UTM campaign. For campaign-level ad numbers, use the ad platform connectors.
Key events are a single total. The data does not split key events by event name, so you cannot ask about one specific event separately from the rest.
Landing pages are capped at the top 5,000 per month by sessions, so landing page totals can be less than the daily traffic total.
No demographics, devices or geography.
Recent days can change. GA4 keeps processing recent data, so Quiriz re-reads the whole 13-month window each day.

Pair this with a GA4 dashboard built by asking, or see how paid clicks tie to analytics in Google Ads conversions in GA4. For ecommerce setups, Quiriz for ecommerce shows the wider picture.

Ask GA4 a question

Connect a GA4 property and ask which channel brought the most revenue last quarter.

Try Quiriz free →

Frequently asked questions

Can I ask Google Analytics questions in plain English?

GA4 has a search box and some insights built in, but they cover simple lookups. For multi-step questions, such as revenue by channel by month compared with the quarter before, an AI that reads your GA4 data and calculates from rows is more flexible. The thing to check is that it uses the same metric definitions each time.

Why do GA4 users not add up across months?

A user who visits in January and again in February is one user in each month and one user in the two-month total. Adding the months counts them twice. So users are reported per period and should never be summed. Sessions, by contrast, do add up.

What is the difference between sessions and engaged sessions?

A session is a visit. GA4 counts it as engaged if it lasted at least 10 seconds, had a key event, or viewed two or more pages. Engagement rate is engaged sessions divided by sessions.

What are key events in GA4?

Key events are the events you mark as important, such as a purchase or a form submission. They were formerly called conversions in GA4. Which events count is a setting in your property, so two properties can report very different key event totals for similar traffic.

Why do my GA4 numbers not match another tool?

GA4 samples some reports, applies its own session and channel rules, uses a property time zone, and may not see users who decline cookies. Differences with an ad platform or store are normal; the useful step is to measure the gap and watch whether it moves.