No, AI hasn’t killed your website traffic (I’ve got the proof)

Everybody's saying it now, aren't they? Google is dead. ChatGPT has killed my website. No one uses websites anymore. It's all AI answers and no click search.

So, to figure out whether this is actually true, I pulled 12 months of live data from around 70 of our real business websites to actually check it. And right now, today, ChatGPT and AI is not taking over your website traffic. And it's not even close. In fact, it's quite embarrassing. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the actual numbers, caveats, and what you should actually be doing with your website in instead of your pants at the doomsayers on LinkedIn.

Search is dead. AI overviews have stolen all my clicks. What's the point in even having a website now? It's absolute nonsense. And yes, this AI stuff is obviously real.

It's changing people's search behavior and it will most definitely get weirder before it even gets better. But rather than just listening to all the AI influence out there, I thought, "All right, then let's go and actually have a look at the actual numbers." I said, "Actually, a lot then, didn't I?" At Genius Division, we look after around 60 or 80 websites every single month through our hosting and support. So I decided to pull off 12 months of analytics from each of those around 70 websites. And I went hunting specifically for AIdriven sessions, not Vibes and not screenshots from LinkedIn. Actual traffic data, actual cold, hard serious data.

Serious because this is a serious topic. It's very serious. And also, if you're about as sick as I am of all the SEO is dead crowd out there, this video is your metaphorical slap in the face because things aren't nearly as bad as people are saying they are. So, let me lay a couple of ground rules out before we get some SEO tosser in the comments having some kind of mental breakdown about what I say. I haven't made up this data, and I wasn't looking at no click searches.

I wasn't interested if someone had vaguely asked ChatGPT a question related to a general industry. What I cared about was people using an AI tool and then actually landing on a website because the website is where we can show an actual offer, build trust, get a form fill, and actually ask somebody to give a booking or contact them in some way. I'm not bothered about the vague AI traffic that everyone else seems to be bothered about right now. So I pulled in traffic data from session sources matching things like ChatGPT, Perplexity, C-Pilot, Grock, Claude, all those similar AI tools. Then I compared total sessions for a whole year versus sessions from AI tools across all of these 70 websites.

And all of these websites, yes, were mostly normal business websites. They weren't giant publisher websites. They didn't have lots of traffic. And they were definitely weren't like weird niche SEO blogs. They were real companies, things like hotels, colleges, manufacturers, charities, local services, the kind of sites that you're probably working on right now and the kind of thing that most people are not talking about when it comes to AI.

So, what did I find? Well, the simple answer is not very much at all, to be honest. The highest percentage of traffic from AI tools on any of the sites I looked at was 2.4%. 4% still a tiny volume. The lowest traffic I found was 0.02%.

Most of the websites I looked at, the traffic from AI tools was around 0.1%. As in for every thousand sessions, maybe one of them came from an AI tool. For example, a big hospitality site that we look after that gets over 2.3 million sessions a year, it had only 840 searches from AI tools. And yes, for the numbers geeks out there, that's 0.04%. It's infidest.

I can't say that word. It's very small. An e-commerce site that we look after that had 21,000 sessions in the last year got 64 sessions from AI tools. That's 0.3% of all traffic. A charity site that we look after had 114,000 searches.

Only 56 sessions came from AI, roughly 0.05%. 05%. And it was really like that across the entire board when I looked at the data. 80,000 sessions, 86 from AI, 516,000 sessions, 220 of them from AI. 200,000 sessions, 400 from AI.

All of that living in the 0.1 to 0.5% range. There were a few weird outliers, but still most of them even then were very, very small. The largest one I saw was 2.4% of sessions coming from AI, but that was an informationheavy website. And even then, that was the exception and not the rule. And even then, we're still only talking about 2.4% of all sessions across an entire year.

It's tiny. I can't emphasize how small this is. My fingers won't go small enough to emphasize how small the amount of AI traffic we are talking about right now is. I mean, it's silly. Now, you also might be thinking, "Okay, cool.

AI isn't showing up as referral traffic, but my analytics are still down. Surely that's AI. A lot of people are now saying that their traffic is 50% down on the last year. Some people are saying 80% down on the last year." So, I went and looked into this, too, to see if that reflected any of the traffic that I had. So, I looked at year onear page views for a random sample of 10 of those websites.

The big site that I was talking about before went from 3.6 million page views to 5.5 million page views. That's a 52% growth. Another went from 532,000 page views to 567,000 page views. That's 6% growth. And another fairly average training website went from 17,000 page views to 33,000 page views.

That's a 94% year-on-year growth. So with those websites, it didn't seem to match. Jack GPT or AI search doesn't seem to be taking traffic away from these websites. In fact, it was the complete opposite. They were growing quite large.

But also, there was the flip side. One of the sites dropped from 20,000 page views to 9.4,000, which is a 50% decrease. I saw a similar figures on one of the other websites. It was 47,000 page views one year and the next year was 22,000 page views. again a 53% drop that time.

Another one of them was 17% down and another one of them was 16% down. But over the 10 sites that I randomly sampled, five of them had increased and five of them had decreased. So it really was a mixed bag when it came to trying to figure out whether AI search was doing anything to these sites. But that's when if you look at the businesses themselves, there's probably some pretty boring explanations as to why this was happening. There was a direct comparison between the industries where traffic was down versus the demand of the actual industry.

And the economy isn't exactly throwing a party right now, especially in the UK. And some of those organizations had ran fewer campaigns or ran fewer events or they' not invested in the website as much as others. What I'm getting at really is I couldn't see any smoking gun that said that AI had stolen this traffic from these websites. Certainly not overnight. I was looking year on year.

If I had to put my money on it, I'd say that right now it's the economy and demand that are doing more damage to these websites than ChatGPT. But before someone else comes in here and goes, well, actually, let's talk about the flaws in this little study of mine because there is some flaws. A lot of these websites were small. In fact, most of them were just 5 to 10,000 sessions per year, but arguably that's most small business websites. They don't get much traffic.

I wasn't measuring no click searches at all because there isn't a way to do it. If someone gets an AI answer and they never click on your website, we're not going to see that in these analytics. But equally, because those people aren't coming to your website, you can't influence them in any way anyway. So, I'd argue that they don't even matter. Some browsers also hide and mangle session sources.

So, there may be a teeny bit of AI traffic in either direct or unassigned in those analytics, but I don't think it would have been much. And yes, some people also block analytics. So this isn't really a perfect data set. But even having said all that, if AI tools were genuinely replacing website traffic right now at scale, you'd expect to see more than 0.1 to 0.5% of that traffic showing up as AI traffic. And I'm just not seeing that.

The AI influencers are not just wrong right now. They're very wrong in capital letters. Capital R O N G um with a W at the front. Uh were wrong. Yes, very were wrong.

I looked at everything. I looked at all the data. I was looking to be proven wrong in this over the 70 of those websites that I looked at. But I just didn't see it in any of the data that I looked at. I didn't see it in the AI sessions.

They were 0.1% of the majority of the websites that I looked at. I didn't see it in the page views. I didn't see traffic significantly dropping off in any of the sites unless it was demand related or economy related. I just didn't see the things that all the AI doomsayers are saying right now. I didn't see any evidence of websites becoming less relevant.

I didn't see any evidence of people not using websites anymore. So, I I don't really know what to say other than maybe my data is completely flawed, but I don't think it is. I just think right now for the average small business website like yours, none of this AI really matters. I think if your website is meant to sell things, book appointments, get inquiries, and that kind of thing right now. AI search and ChatGPT shouldn't even be on your radar.

It shouldn't even be in your business. It shouldn't even be on your notepad. You should just be paying no attention to it whatsoever because it's so irrelevant. 0.1% of all your traffic irrelevant. That's what we're talking about right now.

For the average business website, AI tools are a rounding error at best in somebody's analytics and they're just not worth rebuilding your entire website around. And if some AI search w comes and knocking on your door asking if they can help, you want to tell them to go forth and fornicate. You've probably got bigger problems anyway, like your copy not actually seeing what your business does and no clear call to action on any of the key pages and pages that are taking 4 seconds to load on mobile anyway. If your website is at the core of your funnel right now, GEO or AI search is just not a priority or it shouldn't be a priority for you. What you really need to focus on is getting people visiting products and services pages, reading information, and then performing some kind of action.

Focusing on building content for AI overviews in 2026 is a bit like, I don't know, retiling the bathroom while the kitchen is on fire. It is totally irrelevant and perhaps a little bit dangerous. Will all of this matter in the future? Yes, potentially and potentially quite quickly. This entire video could go out of date in the next 3 months.

I'll have to pull it down and remake it. But right now, all of this AI, it's just noise. It's just noise. It makes no difference to your business or the average business website at all. But there is two places right now where AI does matter.

First, it's those no click and AI overview searches that you're seeing on Google. There's a proportion of people that are searching for things in ChatGPT and Google search and never landing on your website. And a portion of those people are using AI tools to do it. AI is answering basic questions, surfacing brands, and shaping people's expectations. That just means that your website needs to be genuinely useful right now though.

It doesn't mean anything beyond that. It means that you need proper FAQs on your websites, real questions and answers about price timelines, what's included, who is it for, those kind of things. Clear explanations and no jargon. Blogs that actually answer relevant customer questions, not waffle about office dogs or how many marathons that you've run because that's completely irrelevant in 2026. if AI tools are scraping content right now and trust me they are they want to be pulling clear trustworthy information from your website so that's what you need to focus on right now the second part of this is informationheavy publisher style websites you know news type websites if your website is one of those and your whole model is ad revenue or being a giant resource right now then yes you need to be experimenting with AI search AI and being found in AI search because your traffic is going to significantly change over the next couple of years.

In fact, it may have already done it. You may have already seen that 60 to 80% drop off that some people are talking about. But for your average service business or e-commerce brand, I've not seen a single good reason to panic invest in AI, search optimization, GEO, or whatever name that they're giving it this week. So, what should you actually be doing on your website in 2026? Look at your own analytics, check AI referrals, and you'll probably see that they're tiny.

They're not even relevant. 0.1% I'm guessing. What you need to think about is making your website useful, improving service pages on your website, adding real FAQs that mean something that are genuinely useful, and making it damn obvious what you do on your website and what's going to happen next. You need to create genuinely helpful content, guides, explainers, comparisons, that kind of stuff. not thought leadership gobbledegook nonsense cuz nobody cares about that.

I'd argue nobody ever did but it was a thing that we were doing for some random reason. And also you need to fix the basics on your websites and stop chasing this AI trend cuz right now it's not relevant for you. Concentrate on page speed, mobile usability, clear calls to action on your website, and stop hiding your pricing like it's classified information and that no one can have it without having a conversation with you cuz that's blocking sales as it is. 2026 is the year of useful information, not AI slop and not geo. I'm convinced of that right now, but I will add the caveat that I may be proved wrong in 3 or 6 months time, but I'm probably not going to be.

If you're staring at your analytics thinking AI killed your website right now, drop your URL in the comments. Tell me your niche and whether you're actually seeing AI referrals, you're probably not. I'm hoping this video has calmed you down a little bit. So, if it did, hit the like button underneath it so it reaches more people who also think Jack GPT are currently murdering the website traffic. Spoiler, it probably isn't.

You know, I mean, just isn't, you know, for what we said. AI hasn't taken over your website search yet, and you've still got time to make your website useful. And if you want to stop guessing and start fixing your website, I recommend fixing this thing first. That'll only take you about one minute after you've watched the video.