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

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.

A LinkedIn comment on Ryan Law's post about AI sending the same amount of traffic as Reddit. The comment, from Jaime Capitel, reads "And who's talking about good Reddit marketing? Asking for a friend."A LinkedIn comment on Ryan Law's post about AI sending the same amount of traffic as Reddit. The comment, from Wawa Gilewski, reads "Nice insight. What I'm seeing on the supple side is every other new agency popping up on the market promises to do wonders for 'your LLM optimisation'. Yet, Reddit marketing doesn't get the same spotlight."

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).

Ahrefs AI traffic research. AI chatbot traffic distribution. ChatGPT sends 50% of AI traffic, Perplexity sends 30.7%, and Gemini sends 17.6%

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

Ahrefs AI traffic research. Line graph tracking the traffic referral trends of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini from July 2024 to January 2025, highlighting Perplexity's rise and overtaking of Gemini

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.

Kevin Indig AI brand mention research. A bar chart shows average brand mentions for each AI model. Perplexity sends 3.17 brand mentions, ChatGPT sends 2.87, and Google AI sends 2.8

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.

Kevin Indig AI brand mention research, showing the factors that correlate most with AI brand visibility, broken down by AI source (Perplexity, AI Overviews, and ChatGPT), showing Perplexity correlates closest with factors like sentence and word count, Flesch score, and Domains

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.

Bar chart showing Traffic by Source across different website visitor ranges, with Paid, LLM, and Email traffic percentages for visitor segments from less than 10K to over 1M visitors

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.

AI traffic is being underrepresented due to reporting as “direct” traffic in analytics tools.

But, even without tracking anomalies, AI traffic would be modest, because users are able to do more of their research without clicking.

The reality is AI drives significant brand awareness, creates more informed audiences, and delivers more qualified leads—it’s not just about traffic.

Wrapping up

AI is the shiny new thing. Everyone wants to get involved. But AI traffic is still minimal compared to more established channels—you risk over-investing if you get carried away by the hype.

Like social media keeps you on-platform sharing interesting content, AI keeps you on-platform having interesting conversations—sending out external traffic is not the goal.

For that reason, AI will never be one of the top referrers in your site analytics.

Its main benefits are increased brand awareness and positive brand sentiment, through on-platform mentions.

Trackable AI traffic and conversions are a happy byproduct—treat them as your secondary KPIs.

Before you commit to building your AI traffic, ask yourself: are my audience actually using AI to find my business?

Make a judgement call based on regional and vertical AI traffic usage, and your own customer data.

Once you’re confident your audience is there, track AI broadly and regularly.

Track brand mentions in AI

Use a tool like Ahrefs Brand Radar to monitor the growth of your brand mentions, and track brand sentiment in AI.

Ahrefs Brand Radar showing brand mentions in AI Overviews for Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, SE Ranking, BuzzSumo, and Majestic for the topic of backlinks

Track AI traffic

Set up AI traffic reports to track chatbot referral trends…

…and optimize pages that are earning actual visits.

A screenshot of Ahrefs Web Analytics showing a trended line chart comparison of URLs/content receiving traffic from LLMs

Track AI conversions

Improve your conversion tracking to better attribute any AI-assisted conversions.

A screenshot of Ahrefs' Slack channel, highlighting 14k "Where did you learn about Ahrefs" messages referencing Chatgpt

AI traffic is modest, and while it’s not something to ignore, you need to be smart about how you approach it.

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