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0.5% of visitors led 12.1% of signatures
Jun
Search engines still say that traffic with AI search is better quality, but is it? At least in the case of Ahref, this channel has the highest conversion / visit ratio. Visitors to search artificial intelligence convert 23 times higher than time-honored guests of ecological search for Ahrefs.
Terminology in this industry is evolving. I define the search for artificial intelligence as a search that takes place with AI assistants, such as ChatgPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
While we are working on larger research on many websites, I wanted to share more data on how visiting AI searching AI is aiming against visitors to search for Ahrefs.
These data come from Ahrefs Web Analytics, a uncomplicated, free and privacy alternative to Google Analytics.
Let’s immerse ourselves inside.
The AI search movement accounts for only 0.5% of our movement over the last 30 days. 0.3% for YTD.
Here is the trend for the last 12 months. This segment is growing rapidly and we saw a recent growth in May.
In August 2024, November 2024 and May 2025, we observed several fascinating increases. Most growth and general movement come from chatgpt. I did not have the opportunity to look at why we see more visitors from them, but I wonder if they fixed some of the problems that I associated with them without sending recommending data.
This data has been going on for the last 30 days. The enormous majority of registration comes from chatgpt.
It’s crazy, right? 12.1% of signatures from 0.5% of traffic. This channel works really well for us. As I mentioned earlier, visitors to search AI convert 23x better than time-honored visitors to the ecological search for Ahrefs.
Search engines say that the AI search movement is of higher quality, but is it true? I have already shown that the AI search movement was our best -working channel conversions / visitBut what about user indicators on the site?
I would say, yes, the movement is better, but it is a close connection. The rejection indicator and visits to the visit are higher, but the time of the visit is worse.
Less people are reflected when they come from AI search compared to searching. This may be due to the fact that they are further on the go and are ready to take action, at least judging by the conversion rate for those visitors.
Users from AI search do not spend as much time on the site as visitors from time-honored search. It can be a bit unique to us because we have the best blogs and movies in the industry. People really like our content and spend time consuming our information and insights.
Visitors to AI search go to 50% more pages than guests from time-honored search. I have already shown it 80% of our visitors from AI Search for our main page, free tools and product pagesBut they also browse the site more than search guests.
There is a lot of Gotcha with previous data. I have carried out a few grinding searches, platform users and the total estimated internet traffic of search engines compared to AI assistants and I modeled it compared to our movement with these different sources. Based on our data and these models, Users from AI Search click less than 25% of the click amount in time-honored organic search.
This may not be so bad, because most of the search movement has not changed to AI assistants. Many of their users exploit it for other tasks, such as coding.
If AI search becomes by default, our search movement may be less than 25% of our current movement. I will accept it as long as the conversion rate will remain higher, but I’m not sure if it will scale this way. If it is a scale, we would see more than 5 times conversions based on a higher conversion rate, and my intestines tell me that it will not be so good.
It looks like I’m not the only one who feels like that. Ryan’s own law says:
These CTRs are probably the highest that will ever be when the novelty of this format is aimed at.
Search engines think it will go the other way. According to Microsoft Bing:
With the progress of AI, the value of clicks increases and it is expected to continue to grow.
I hope Bing is right.
It will take great corrections from marketers and companies to accept the novel norm, but it doesn’t look like we will have a choice in this matter. We will have to adapt our goals and KPIs and educate our stakeholders on this change.
Final thoughts
Visitors from AI Search after Ahrefs seem to be of higher quality and transform better than guests from time-honored search.
We are still processing data for larger research in many pages and we will soon have this information.
