- Video
Don't waste time on AI search for your website
Everyone’s panicking about AI search. Across about 70 of our websites, it sends almost nothing.
▶Play the video: Don't waste time on AI search for your websiteBefore you call me a dinosaur who doesn’t get AI, here’s the thing nobody selling GEO ever does. Looking at the data. Novel concept, I know.
We look after about 70 business websites and I check their analytics every month. So I pulled 12 months of it across the lot and counted the traffic from AI search: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the rest.
It’s embarrassingly low. On most of those sites, AI sent between 0.1% and 0.5% of traffic. The highest was 2.4%. The lowest was 0.02%. That’s the AI tidal wave everybody is wetting their pants over.
It’s not just our 70 websites. Independent industry numbers say the same. Across the whole web, AI sends roughly 1% of traffic. Boring old search engines still send about half.
So whether to pay someone to optimise your website for that 1% right now pretty much answers itself. More in is GEO worth paying for?
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Read the full transcript
Now before you call me a dinosaur who doesn't really get AI, let's do one thing that nobody selling Geo is actually ever doing. Let's look at the data. I know it's a novel concept, isn't it? So I run a web agency and we look after about probably 70 business websites, I'd say. I look at all that analytics every single month.
So I decided to pull off 12 months of that analytics data across the entire lot of websites and I counted how much traffic actually came from AI search. So ChatGPT, but actually Gemini, Claude, all of the like. And the number of it it's embarrassingly low. On most of those websites, AI sent between 0.1 and 0.5% of traffic. The highest I found on any of our websites was a high 2.4%.
The lowest of them though was 0.02%. Yes, that is it. That's the AI tidal wave everybody is currently wetting their pants over. And don't just take me and my paltry 70 websites. The independent industry numbers say exactly the same thing.
Across the whole web right now, that's the entire web, AI sends roughly 1% of all traffic. That's 1%. Meanwhile, boring old search engines are out there still sending half of all traffic. So just to clarify this, that's 50% of search engine traffic versus 1% of AI search traffic. So the question for this whole video is dead simple and I don't even really think I need to ask it now.
Should you be paying anybody to optimize your website for that 1% right now? Mhm.