AI search has moved beyond being something businesses should “keep an eye on”. We now have enough data from our own clients, and our own website, to see how visibility is developing and, more importantly, what people do when AI sends them to a website.
We’ve just published 3 new AI Visibility case studies across some very different businesses: B2B construction, multichannel retail and a digital consultancy.
The numbers outside of Google are relatively small. The direction of travel is not.
First, a word about what we can actually measure
This matters, because AI search reporting is still far from perfect.
Since May, Google Search Console has allowed us to see impressions from Google’s AI results. What it doesn’t give us is a separate measure of the clicks those results generate (Google seems to want to keep this a guarded secret for now). Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode are hidden within traffic categorised as “Organic”.
That means when we look in Google Analytics at identifiable AI traffic, we’re looking at visits from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. It does not include traffic generated by Google AI Overviews or AI Mode.
So the AI traffic you can currently identify in GA4 is only part of the picture.
AI traffic is growing.
Nobody should be pretending that AI assistants have suddenly replaced Google as a major source of website traffic.
They haven’t.
What we’re seeing, however, is growth. At the same time, the proportion of Google impressions coming through AI results across our AI visibility case studies has nearly trebled since May.
That feels much more significant than looking at today’s percentage of website traffic in isolation. If you only measure AI by the number of identifiable visits currently appearing in GA4, you’re missing a sizeable part of the story.
The really interesting bit is what happens when people arrive
This is where our results got our attention.
Across our sample, visitors coming from AI assistants spent around two to three times longer on site than the average visitor.
More importantly, conversion rates were considerably stronger across the board too. In one case, visitors from AI assistants converted at more than four times the site average.
At a channel level, Shopping Ads remain an exception. Someone clicking on a product ad is already showing very strong buying intent. Outside that environment, though, the behaviour of visitors coming from AI assistants stands out.
It makes sense when you think about how people use them.
Someone has often already asked a fairly detailed question, refined what they’re looking for and received a recommendation or suggested source before they click through. They aren’t necessarily arriving at the beginning of their research.
They may be several steps further down the road.
ChatGPT is leading the pack
There are now visits arriving from a growing number of AI assistants, but ChatGPT is clearly the dominant source in our data.
That may change. One thing the past couple of years has taught us is not to build a strategy around the assumption that today’s platform mix will stay today’s platform mix.
For now, though, if you’re wondering whether people really are moving from ChatGPT conversations onto business websites, the answer from our data is very clearly yes.
Good blogs are earning their keep
We’ve also been looking at which pages AI assistants refer to in the data behind our AI Visibility case studies.
For businesses publishing strong, genuinely helpful blog content, around 30–50% of the pages most frequently referred to by AI are blog articles.
That’s an important distinction.
The job of a blog isn’t simply to generate a stream of people clicking through from Google. Good content gives search engines and AI platforms something useful to understand, reference and recommend when somebody asks a relevant question.
We’ve said for some time that businesses need to build topic depth rather than simply produce more content. We’re now seeing the evidence for why that matters.
So, are you still ignoring AI search?
We’re not suggesting you throw away everything you know about SEO and chase the latest shiny object. Far from it. All 3 of our AI Visibility case studies were built on strong SEO foundations.
Our results tell us something rather more grounded.
AI visibility is growing. The traffic we can identify is highly engaged. It is converting well above the average. Good content is being referenced. And much of the impact still isn’t fully visible in traditional website analytics.
For one of our clients, Google’s AI responses (not included in the AI numbers in Analytics) have increased tenfold. For another, fifteenfold. On our own site, they’ve grown eightfold.
AI search is no longer a future marketing channel. People are already using it to find businesses, research options and decide where to go next.
The question is whether they’re finding you.
Want to know how visible your business is in AI search?
Contact WSI Digital Advisors to request an AI Visibility Report and we’ll show you where you’re appearing, where the gaps are and where the opportunities lie.
