Search engines keep telling us traffic from AI search is better quality, but is it? At least for Ahrefs, this channel has the highest Conversion / Visit ratio. AI search visitors convert at a 23x higher rate than traditional organic search visitors for Ahrefs.
The terminology in this industry is evolving. I’m defining AI search as search that happens in AI assistants like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
While we’re working on a larger study across many websites, I wanted to share more data on how AI search visitors measure up against search visitors for Ahrefs.
This data comes from Ahrefs Web Analytics, a simple, free, and privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.
Let’s dive in.
issues I called out related to them not sending referral data.
80% of our visitors from AI search go to our homepage, free tools, and product pages, but they also browse around the site more than visitors from search.
Ahrefs
Search engines believe it will go the other way. According to Microsoft Bing:
As AI advances, the value of clicks is rising and expected to continue rising.
It’s going to take a huge adjustment from marketers and from businesses to accept the new normal, but it doesn’t look like we’ll have a choice in the matter. We’ll have to adjust our goals and KPIs, and educate our stakeholders on this shift.
Final thoughts
Visitors from AI search to Ahrefs do seem to be higher quality and convert better than visitors from traditional search.
