AI Visitors Visit Fewer Pages and Bounce More Often Than Traditional Search Visitors

our AI visitors convert at a 23x higher rate than our organic search visitors.

2. They were dissatisfied with the answer and left

On the other hand, higher bounces can also, of course, signal dissatisfaction.

If what a user sees doesn’t immediately match their expectations, they bounce–especially if the content or on-site experience is not yet designed for those users.

Wrapping up

So, is AI traffic really better quality? From a user behavior perspective, not quite.

The only metric AI users won was time on site–and not by much.

High bounces, low pages per session, and high time on site points to information validation or “one-and-done” behavior.

That said, AI traffic arguably drives more “unplanned” discovery. If users engage briefly and leave, that’s not necessarily a poor signal, just a different context.

And, of course, there’s the matter of conversions.

As per our “anecdata” above, we have seen higher conversion rates (~12%) from AI, and so have others.

Vercel is managing 10% CVRs from AI, and AI is Tally’s largest acquisition channel–helping them boost ARR by $1M.

We’ve only just released conversion tracking in Ahrefs Web Analytics, but as soon as we have enough data, I’m hoping to dig into AI conversions.

Until then, I’ll keep tracking AI data and sharing what I find.