AI Makes Up 0.1% of Traffic, but Clicks Aren’t Everything

While AI traffic is growing as a referral source, Google still dominates by a factor of 345x, and Reddit out-refers all three major AIs combined.

As it stands AI traffic isn’t making much of a dent, so is it worth pursuing?

Here’s what we know so far…

Sidenote.

Thanks to our data scientist Xibeijia Guan for aggregating all of the data behind this research.

questioning whether we’re over-investing in AI, vs. other channels.

But traffic isn’t the only thing that matters.

It’s also about awareness and conversions, and we’re seeing signs that AI can deliver on both fronts.

For instance, approximately 3% of our own conversions have come from AI over the last year, based on registration data, and qualitative “how did you hear about us?” responses.

AI traffic study).

Our new research shows that Perplexity has overtaken Gemini as a traffic referral source.

According to data from Kevin Indig, Perplexity is the AI most likely to cite a brand in its responses, which does a lot to explain this growth.

In the same study, Kevin reveals that brand mentions in ChatGPT correlate most with a site’s domain rating, while Perplexity and AI overview mentions correlate with deep content.

AI traffic research.

Sites receiving under 10K visits can now expect 0.3% of their traffic to come from LLMs, vs. 0.1% for those exceeding 1 million visits.

Smaller sites also tend to attract more traffic from AI than they do from email, while the opposite is true of larger sites.

One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that smaller sites and brands are less familiar to the user, resulting in more research-geared clicks.