AI Traffic Has Increased 9.7x in the Past Year

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Though still <1% of total traffic, it’s now our highest converting channel at 10%+ CVR (going by our new custom event tracking in Web Analytics).

I wanted to see if other sites were experiencing any AI traffic growth–especially now that zero-click search has taken hold.

We decided to update the findings of our March AI traffic research while we were at it.

With the help of Xibeijia, Ahrefs’ awesome data scientist, we’ve analyzed 81,947 sites (up from ~35K sites in March), to understand more about AI traffic today.

Over the past year, the average site’s search traffic has dropped by about 21%, while its AI traffic has grown roughly 10 times.

Going by our own CTR research, that search traffic decline is likely the work of AI Overviews and AI Mode.

AIO/AIM traffic currently gets tracked as “Search” traffic in site analytics tools. In the words of Patrick Stox, these features are not “broken out in a way that can be reliably tracked.”

In other words, we can’t yet filter between “traditional search” and “AI search”. So, while we have compared “search traffic” and ”AI traffic” in this study, some of that “search traffic” will technically be driven by AI features.

Despite what we’ve seen in Ahrefs data, average AI traffic doesn’t seem to have grown much over the last few months. We saw a peak in April, but May and June figures dipped again.

AI traffic now represents 0.25% of a site’s total traffic, on average. It’s still a drop in the ocean, but as we’ve acknowledged before, it’s likely AI referral traffic is at least somewhat underestimated.

Google is still the top referral source for all sites in our study, accounting for 39.35% of all referral traffic–though this is down slightly from our last study (-1.79 percentage points).

Sidenote.

Bear in mind that this isn’t a perfect like-for-like comparison with our March study, as the dataset size has increased.

Google sends a whopping 210x more traffic than the “Big three” AI platforms–though the gap has narrowed since March, when Google sent 345x more traffic.

But what immediately jumped out at me from this latest data capture was ChatGPT’s growth.

In our previous study, Reddit was out-referring all three major AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini) combined.

Now, ChatGPT alone sends out marginally more traffic than Reddit (+0.05%) and LinkedIn (+0.06%).

The bar isn’t exactly high here. Reddit and LinkedIn are famously zero-click platforms, designed to disincentivize off-site visits. But it shows clear growth, nonetheless.

And it doesn’t end there.

ChatGPT has driven AI traffic growth almost single-handedly, growing 85% since January.

It has further cemented its status as the top AI referrer–sending >80% of AI traffic–up ~30% since our last study.

The “big three” AI traffic referrers have also changed since we last looked–Copilot is back in business following a referral outage, and now sends on more AI traffic than Gemini.

In all, this new trio refer 0.19% of a site’s total traffic on average (up from 0.12% in March).

Wrapping up

AI traffic is still marginal–nothing has changed there–but the makeup of that traffic is shifting, and we’ve witnessed some moderate growth.

While it has levelled out for now, I’m confident there’s still more to come.

As search clicks decline, AI clicks are on the up–but as I’ve said before, AI is never going to be a significant source of traffic for most sites.

And there isn’t a world where AI traffic will replace the traffic we’ve enjoyed from search.

The MO of any AI platform is to answer a user’s questions natively, after all.

So, overlook search at your peril…

In the words of Glenn Gabe:

“I think site owners run the risk of missing the forest for the trees by heavily focusing on AI search right now and ignoring Google Search…the fact of the matter is that Google still drives the most traffic to sites by a mile.”