AI may be reducing organic search traffic to your website. But is AI sending you traffic? In the screenshot below, you can see that the top 10 referral traffic sources for one of our sites includes both ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai. This site isn’t the only one, and those are not the only generative AI tools sending us traffic. AI referrals definitely send our clients traffic.
How can you tell?
One way that AI can send you traffic is by showing a link to your website in the AI summary on google search results. You can often see these links in the upper right side of the SERPs. The screenshot below shows one of our sites, the Puerto Rico Report, as a linked source for an AI summary answer. We see several of our sites in this spot frequently.
You may happen to catch sight of your organization’s website in the AI summaries on Google search. You might not catch a glimpse of that and you won’t see it noted in your analytics, so it’s hard to know for sure whether that is happening or not.
However, you can expect to see the generative AI tools like ChatGPT listed in the referrals section of your web analytics. The screenshot at the top of this post is from JetPack. The screenshot below is from Google Analytics, specifically from the Traffic Acquisition report. Both gemini.google.com and perplexity.ai are generative AI tools. You might also see Copilot, ask.ai, and more specialized tools as well.
If you do not see AI referrals in your web analytics, you probably are not getting traffic from AI referrals.
Do you want AI referrals?
This is a new enough development that we do not have large amounts of data on conversion rates for this type of traffic. We are glad to see it. We know that AI searches are becoming ever more popular, and they take traffic away from publishers’ websites. Sometimes we’ve seen generative AI tools reproducing our websites’ answers to questions almost verbatim without credit. Now, however, they are more likely to provide those links.
From our point of view, this means we’re getting back some of the lost traffic.
We may not be seeing as many people who need a quick answer, but instead we are seeing people who want more depth in their answers and more follow-up information — and therefore are probably more likely to convert.
If you’re primarily an e-commerce site or offering local services, you may find that searchers coming to you from AI referrals have used these tools to narrow down their choices and are more likely to convert. As we say, we do not have enough data for this issue to make confident statements, but this seems possible.
How can you get AI referrals?
All you have to do is have the best answer source on the web for a given question. In the AI tool’s opinion. Most of our sites have this type of traffic, but we are a content-focused firm and the sites we care for have a lot of high-quality content. The sites for which we see analytics and do not see AI referrals are those which do not have regular fresh content and do not have lots of in-depth articles. That seems to be the primary difference.
The narrower and more focused the questions you answer, the more likely you are to show up. Also, the more authoritative your website, the more likely. We have not seen differences among sites with different design features and we have seen AI referrals to sites with widely varying levels of traffic. At this point, a focus on quality content seems to be the best way to get this type of traffic.
If you need assistance with your web content, reach out and we will be glad to help.
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