/ Craig Burgess
No. I pulled a year of analytics from about 70 business websites we look after, and AI sent a tiny slice of their visitors. The ups and downs came from somewhere far more boring.
No. On most of the business websites we look after, AI tools sent somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of visitors over the last year. That’s one to five people in every thousand.
LinkedIn seems to have decided otherwise. Google’s dead, ChatGPT has eaten your website, nobody clicks on anything any more, it’s all AI answers now. I got sick of hearing it, so I went and checked. (Yes, this is another hot take about AI. At least it’s got some numbers in it.)
How I checked
We look after about 70 websites at Genius Division. Hosting, updates, and I go through the analytics every month. So I pulled 12 months of data for the lot and went looking for visits that came from AI tools: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Grok and the like.
Then I compared those AI visits with the total visits for each site across the year.
These are normal business websites. Hotels, colleges, manufacturers, charities, local services. No giant news publishers and no weird SEO blogs. A lot like yours.
I only counted people who used an AI tool and then actually landed on the website. That’s the bit a business should care about, because the website is where somebody reads your offer, works out whether they trust you and fills in the form. If someone asks ChatGPT a vague question and never comes near you, there was nothing you could have shown them anyway.
How much traffic does AI actually send?
Hardly any.
- On most sites, AI tools sent between 0.1% and 0.5% of sessions.
- The highest I found anywhere was just under 2.5%, and that was an information-heavy site. Even that’s a small number.
- The lowest was 0.02%.
A more recent one for scale. One client’s website had 49,153 visitors in a month, and 300 of them came from AI. That’s 0.47%.
That’s the tidal wave everybody’s wetting themselves over.
So why is my traffic down?
Fair question. I hear it a lot, usually with a number like “down by half” attached and AI getting the blame. So I looked at that too.
I took a random sample of 10 of the sites and compared their page views year on year. Five of them were up on the year before and the other five were down, some of them by a fair bit.
If AI was hoovering up website traffic across the board, you’d expect that to lean one way. It didn’t. It was a coin toss.
When I looked at the businesses behind the numbers, the explanations were dull. Traffic followed demand in their industry. Some had run fewer campaigns or events that year, and some hadn’t put much into their website for a while. And the UK economy isn’t exactly throwing a party.
I couldn’t find a smoking gun for AI on any of them. If I had to put money on it, the economy and demand are doing a lot more damage to these websites than ChatGPT is.
What the data doesn’t show
It’s not a perfect study, and I’d rather say so before some SEO bloke emails to tell me.
- Most of these sites are small. That’s normal for small business websites, but worth knowing.
- I can’t measure zero-click searches. If somebody gets an answer from AI and never visits, analytics won’t see it. (Then again, you couldn’t have sold them anything either.)
- Some browsers hide or mangle where a visit came from, so a bit of AI traffic will be sat in “direct” or “unassigned”.
- Some people block analytics altogether.
Even allowing for all that, if AI was replacing website visits at any real scale, you’d see a lot more than a fraction of a percent turning up from it. I didn’t.
Could it change? Course it could. This stuff moves fast and I might be eating my words in a year. But the numbers today are tiny, and today is what I’d plan around.
Who should be worried about AI?
A couple of groups, a bit.
If your website is a big publisher or information site that makes its money from ads or from being a giant resource, AI answers will hit you harder, and you should be experimenting with it now. The only site near 2.5% in my data was that kind of site.
And everybody will have some people who ask AI a basic question and never click. That’s real. The fix is having clear, useful information on your website, so when AI tools scrape it (and they are) they find something worth repeating.
For a normal service business or online shop, I’ve not seen one good reason to panic.
What to watch instead
Stop staring at the traffic graph waiting for it to tell you something. Traffic was never the point anyway. 30,000 visitors and no enquiries is still no enquiries.
Watch the stuff that pays you:
- Enquiries, calls, bookings and sales, month on month.
- Which pages people were on before they got in touch.
- How fast your pages load on a phone.
- Your AI referrals, once, so you can see how small they are and get on with your day.
Checking AI takes a couple of minutes. In your analytics, filter sessions by source for things like chatgpt.com, perplexity and gemini.google.com, and compare that with your total. I’d bet it’s tiny.
Then put the time into your website. Make it dead obvious what you do. Answer the questions customers actually ask, on the service pages where they’re asking them. Put your prices on. Bin the blog posts about the office dog and the MD’s marathon.
Speed is the one people ignore most. Wolf Laundry were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads. Their site took ten seconds to load, and over half the people who clicked an ad never saw it. We rebuilt it and it loads in about a second. They had 30 to 60 leads a month within weeks, and they’re on 150 to 200 a month now. AI had nothing to do with any of it, in either direction.
If you’re not sure whether your own site is the thing holding you back, have a go at do I need a new website?
And if your traffic has fallen off a cliff, I’d have a good look at your own business before blaming a chatbot.