We studied the site visitors of three,000 web sites to raised perceive the scale and make-up of AI site visitors—together with how a lot of it’s being despatched, the most typical referral sources, and the way that differs relying on the scale of the website.
We analyzed the site visitors variations between websites driving larger than 10,000 guests, between 1,000 and 9,999 guests, and under 999 guests per 30 days, throughout the next seven AI chatbots: ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Jasper, and Mistral.
Listed below are our high findings:
- 63% of web sites obtain AI site visitors total
- 98% of AI site visitors is shipped by three chatbots
- ChatGPT is the most important referrer, accounting for 50% of AI site visitors
- 0.17% of the common web site’s site visitors comes from AI chatbots
- The smallest web sites get the best % of whole site visitors from AI
Due to our knowledge scientist Xibeijia Guan for aggregating all the knowledge behind this research.
We analyzed whole site visitors knowledge from an anonymized pattern of three,000 websites.
Throughout the entire pattern, 1,900 websites obtained not less than one go to from an AI supply.
it one other approach, 63% of the websites in our research had not less than one customer arrive by way of an AI chatbot.
Based on the information we will precisely attribute, you might have roughly a 2 in 3 likelihood of receiving a website go to by way of AI.
This knowledge depends on the referral supply being trackable in analytics, but it surely’s necessary to notice that some AI site visitors will pull by means of as “direct”.
In different phrases, this knowledge represents simply the seen AI site visitors—the minimal quantity of AI guests a web site receives.
Whereas there’s absolutely extra to the story, you possibly can nonetheless be taught rather a lot about your AI visibility from the information you can monitor.
Monitoring your AI site visitors can present you which of them sources ship customers your approach, which pages in your website act as AI site visitors magnets, and the way that site visitors is altering or rising over time.
Realizing this, you possibly can optimize your AI referral pages and paths, separating pages that drive self-importance site visitors from those who really interact or convert.
But, I’d also recommend reading the following posts:
Analyze your own AI traffic with Ahrefs Web Analytics
You can see your own referral traffic from AI in Ahrefs Web Analytics when you link up your site via a snippet of Javascript.
Once that’s done, follow these steps:
- Head to “Dashboard”
- Click on “Projects”
- Select the “Web Analytics” tab
- Click on your project
Then, add a “channel” filter to see a breakdown of your LLM traffic.
Or a “source” filter to home-in on a specific AI referral source, like ChatGPT…
We studied seven of the preferred AI chatbots, and there was a really clear trinity main the approach.
ChatGPT despatched over half of all AI site visitors, adopted by Perplexity which despatched simply shy of a 3rd, after which Gemini which referred ~18%.
The remaining AI chatbots—Claude, Copilot, Mistral, and Jasper—handed on lower than 2% of AI site visitors between them.
Copilot’s lack of referral site visitors stunned me on condition that it’s related to the open net, and has real-time retrieval capabilities—to not point out a market share that exceeds even Gemini or Perplexity.
It’s clear that if you need site visitors from AI, you want to focus your consideration on the “huge three” chatbots driving 98% of AI site visitors: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
ChatGPT, particularly, ought to be your essential focus, because it drives half of all AI referrals.
As a share of common month-to-month site visitors, 0.12% of a website’s views, and 0.17% of its guests come from AI.
This aligns with what many different entrepreneurs are seeing in early-stage LLM site visitors research…
A publish from Circulate Company Founder, Viola Eva, displaying that lower than 1% of site visitors got here from AI, based mostly on her research of 26 B2B SaaS websites.
A remark from Kevin Indig on Viola Eva’s publish, revealing he’s additionally seeing minimal quantities of site visitors from AI/LLMs proper now.
Rüdiger Dalchow discovered that B2B SaaS websites had been receiving 0.2% and 1.02% of their site visitors from AI.
Olaf Kopp noticed that AI site visitors share stood at simply 0.57% of whole periods
Your analytics might present comparable and even greater AI site visitors numbers.
Throughout all three cohorts, we seen the highest websites selecting up roughly 6% of their whole site visitors from AI, with one website incomes as a lot as 18%.
Whereas ~0.17% may appear negligible, true figures are doubtless north of this, since AI visits can get bundled in with “direct” site visitors.
With these sorts of reporting quirks, discovering different methods to attribute your AI site visitors and conversions is a should.
One avenue you possibly can go down is organising qualitative monitoring strategies like “How did you hear about us?” kinds, to catch what analytics may miss.
For instance, we gather qualitative suggestions on registration, and so far we’ve seen 14K+ self-attributed new customers from ChatGPT.
Ahrefs registration suggestions knowledge, shared by Tim Soulo, proving AI visits can result in conversions
Now that we’ve analyzed common AI site visitors throughout our total pattern, let’s dig deeper into particular person cohorts.
Predictably, the websites incomes extra visits had been additionally those selecting up probably the most AI site visitors.
One factor entrepreneurs and SEOs have famous about AI instruments is that they appear to have a penchant for bigger manufacturers…
“AI loves mentioning model names, no matter whether or not a model is included within the immediate. There are some manufacturers that AI can’t cease speaking about. Which means that as AI utilization grows, some manufacturers may have a giant advertising and marketing head begin. Now could be one of the best/best time to develop into considered one of these manufacturers as a result of the competitors is the sparsest.”
“Sooner or later, giant manufacturers are prone to maintain substantial benefits in search engine rankings and generative AI outputs on account of their superior PR and advertising and marketing assets.”
However our knowledge reveals that smaller manufacturers (<999 month-to-month guests) really seize extra AI site visitors as a share of their whole site visitors.
AI optimization isn’t only for the massive canines.
Whereas smaller websites get minimal site visitors from AI instruments, proportionally, they choose up extra of it—that means they should pay simply as a lot consideration to their AI referrals.
The info additionally present a distinction within the make-up of AI referral sources throughout the cohorts.
Websites with fewer visits see much less variety—notice how ChatGPT sends a larger proportion of AI site visitors to smaller web sites than it does to bigger ones.
It’s smart for any website to focus its AI optimization efforts on ChatGPT, but smaller sites in particular need to pay special attention to this source—not only will it send them the most AI traffic, it’s also one of the few chatbots that sends over visible traffic that’s able to be monitored in analytics tools.
Earlier on, I stated I used to be stunned by Copilot’s lack of AI referral site visitors. I discussed its dominant market share and the truth that it has the power to quote its sources.
However I used to be principally stunned as a result of I do know that Copilot has traditionally despatched over excessive volumes of referral site visitors.
Final 12 months, for example, Ahrefs was receiving a wholesome quantity of site visitors from Copilot—in truth, it was our second-highest AI referrer.
However our site visitors from Copilot began to drop off round This autumn 2024. And this drop wasn’t distinctive to us. I validated the identical development in different corporations’ analytics situations.
Since roughly October, it’s attainable Copilot has been holding again referrer data.
I ran a really small-scale take a look at to learn how Copilot site visitors is getting reported in Ahrefs Net Analytics at this time, because it not appears to be coming from the unique supply:
copilot.microsoft.com.
From the Copilot chatbot, I engineered a immediate that will permit me to navigate to an obscure web page on the Ahrefs website—one which hadn’t obtained any site visitors on the day of testing.
Then I considered the site visitors report in Ahrefs instantly after.
I used to be ready to do that as a result of Ahrefs’ Net Analytics tracks real-time knowledge, that means I might immediately see web site guests inside 1 minute of an occasion.
The supply of the go to confirmed up as “Direct” (see under).
I repeated this similar take a look at a couple of instances, and in all circumstances, the go to registered as “Direct”.
This aligns with what we’d anticipate to see from web sites that don’t cross on referrer data, in response to Patrick Stox.
“Web sites have control over what info they send. They’ll ship the total path, simply the origin, or nothing—it’s as much as them. We report no matter referrer we’re informed to report. In the event that they don’t ship us one, then it could go within the ‘Direct’ bucket.”
Patrick additionally factors out that this may not be a strategic transfer by Copilot, however slightly a mistake.
“Typically it’s a mistake. There was a time when the Google app on cell stripped the referrer, for instance.”
I did the identical test on Mistral and Jasper, and located that their AI referral site visitors additionally pulls by means of as “direct”.
The implication of that is AI site visitors is probably going being vastly underestimated.
And if AI site visitors is being underestimated, you will be positive AI conversions are too—notably since changing customers don’t all the time click on by means of from AI.
Otso Karvinen asserts that AI customers don’t all the time click on straight from AI instruments by means of to web sites, and that visits might occur at a later date.
AI instruments actually come into their very own when driving model consciousness. Whereas it’s nonetheless attainable to transform customers from AI, that doesn’t all the time occur in a single neatly packaged conversion journey.
Realizing the constraints in monitoring AI site visitors and conversions is essential when you’re setting marketing campaign expectations or reporting outcomes to shoppers and stakeholders.
Remaining ideas
You should use the information on this research to benchmark your personal AI site visitors and handle expectations.
When you shouldn’t anticipate tons of AI visits proper now, your AI site visitors is prone to be larger than your analytics is ready to present.
With that in thoughts, regulate your “direct” site visitors. If platforms like Copilot are holding again referrer data, fascinating issues is perhaps hiding in there.
For example, take note of direct site visitors spikes for particular person pages—this may simply be an indication that untraceable AI sources are referencing that content material.
We’ve learnt that bigger websites get extra site visitors from AI—but when your website is small, your AI referrals are going to account for a bigger share of your whole site visitors.
Discover and optimize your most-cited content material, create extra of it, then deal with incremental positive factors from ChatGPT.
If you happen to discovered this research fascinating, test again on the weblog for extra AI site visitors analysis.
