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80% of our search movement AI goes to our main page, product pages and free tools
Jun
For years, Google and Bing ordered SEO to focus on their users, create great content and add unique observations. They say the same in the AI era, but is that true?
To answer this question, I looked at the recommendation movement from AI searching using Ahrefs Web Analytics and compared it to the movement of ecological search ahrefs.com. Ahrefs Web Analytics, plain, free and focused on privacy alternative to Google Analytics. Try it if you haven’t done it yet.
We have a channel segment for LLM, which groups the movement of various AI assistants. You don’t have to add a custom to this, just like in GA4.
I want to add a few reservations. Not the entire movement of AI assistants is recorded correctly. I hope that many will fix this problem, but by that time everyone will have problems with attribute in which the AI search movement is unavailable. The AI review is also not broken down in a reliable way, thanks to which the movement is connected to movement in search of this test.
Let’s immerse ourselves inside.
Over 80% of our recommendation movement from AI search goes only to 3 types of content. Free tools, product pages and our home page.
Ahrefs is known for our information content, our courses and data research. We have the best content in the entire SEO industry, but our entire content, which is consistent with what search engines tell us, is just a fraction of the AI search movement.
Did they lie to us? Will the great content in which we should focus, or will AI assistants simply steal this move? Read on to find out.
Wait, huh? 3.6% of the movement went to hallucinated pages
These pages do not exist at ahrefs.com. These systems invented them. It was mainly chatgpt, but other systems also had several hallucinations.
To check this, I used Google sheets and downloaded page status codes. We add a way to be easily checked in Ahrefs Web Analytics.
What I would recommend to choose a visiting threshold on these pages, say 10 / month, where it is worth recovering this movement and redirecting it to the appropriate pages.
Here is the view of how motion makeup changes between AI search commands and ecological search.
Product pages and home page Excessive performance in AI search compared to organic search. Does this mean that I should do something to optimize the content of these pages for AI search?
Probably not. This means that we have a forceful brand and forceful products that are recommended by these systems. We will continue to build better products and win the hearts and minds of digital marketers around the world.
All our helpful content also works better in searching AI than in searching, at least as a percentage of movement. AI search still does not send a lot of traffic to websites compared to searching, so there is no visibility and I am not sure if it will be so. We have seen that the AI review reduced clicks by 34.5%, and Google AI mode will probably reduce them even more.
Does this mean that we should stop optimizing for this type of movement? NO. It simply means that we will have to fight harder for less street traffic. Cost / benefits analysis changes. The content with higher costs and effort will be more complex to justify whether it will not augment so much brand visibility or revenues.
Free tools were a great loser compared to the search AI vs Organic Search Ruch. They were still our largest traffic driver with 36.4% of all traffic, but it is simply not as good as in organic search. It is worth investing because they are good main drivers for us and it looks like they will continue to be a significant amount of traffic that we get from AI search.
It does not look good for international sites. In the case of search movement, they constitute 22.2% of all clicks per page. In the case of AI search movement, it is only 3.1%.
I am not sure if this is because people do not employ chats in other languages or if these sites are insufficiently represented in their training data. I hope that this number is growing in the future, but now it does not look good for international traffic.
Final thoughts
While the AI search movement goes to different sides, I do not think that we make stern changes in our strategy based on this data, at least not yet. The AI search movement is growing, but is still a fraction of our general movement.
