If you have felt pressure to spend money on "AI visibility" or "GEO" (generative engine optimization), there is new data worth seeing first. Three studies, rounded up by Search Engine Roundtable on October 22, all point the same way: right now, AI assistants send only a small share of the visitors and sales that Google Search does.
What the studies found
Marie Haynes, 100 websites. Haynes looked at 12 months of Google Analytics 4 data from 100 sites with more than 145 million sessions. Sessions from ChatGPT came to just 0.62% of the volume Google organic search sent. ChatGPT visitors converted at about 4.5 times the Google organic rate (13.8% vs. 3.02%). Even so, Google drove 96.5% of total conversions, about 27 times as many as all the other LLMs combined.
SEO Works, 95 websites. This benchmark covers September 2025 to August 2026 (66 sites met its volume thresholds). Organic search delivered 39 times more sessions than AI assistants (2,825,594 vs. 72,095). For every 100 conversions from organic search, AI referrals delivered 3.2. Per visit, AI sessions converted slightly better (7.18% vs. 6.08%), but there were far fewer of them.
Kevin Indig, 12 sites. Indig tested a popular theory: that people see your brand in AI answers and later visit your site directly. Across his sample, he found AI-driven direct traffic to long-tail pages "not detectable yet" and no reliable relationship between AI visibility and branded or direct traffic.
The caveats
These are independent industry studies, not Google data. Samples are small, and results can differ by niche. AI traffic may grow later, so nobody is saying to ignore it forever.
Why this matters for small businesses
For most shops and service businesses, budget and time are limited. These numbers suggest the biggest return is still in classic search: pages Google can crawl and index, fast load times, clear titles and helpful content.
What to do
- Check your own numbers. In GA4, compare sessions and conversions from google / organic with referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. Decide based on your data, not hype.
- Fix the basics first. Make sure your key pages are indexable, have no noindex tags by mistake, load fast and have unique titles and descriptions.
- Be careful with GEO offers. If someone sells you an AI-visibility package, ask what traffic or sales it is expected to bring, and how they will measure it.
- Keep an eye on AI. Review your AI referral numbers once a quarter so you notice if things change.
Check that your analytics is installed
You can only compare your own numbers if your site has an analytics tool. The SEOSFT Tracking check reads your homepage and shows which tools it finds, such as Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager.
Sources
- Search Engine Roundtable, AI search studies roundup: https://www.seroundtable.com/ai-search-studies-42359.html
- SEO Works, AI referral traffic benchmark (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23040387
- SEO Works, AI referral traffic benchmark (download page): https://www.seoworks.co.uk/downloads/ai-referral-traffic-benchmark/