Does AI Search Traffic Convert Better Than Traditional Search? For Ahrefs, Yes: 0.5% of Visitors Drove 12.1% of Signups
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...
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Article Performance
Data from Ahrefs
The number of websites linking to this post.
This post's estimated monthly organic search traffic.
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. AI search traffic accounts for just 0.5% of our traffic for the last 30 days. 0.3% for YTD. Here’s the trend for the last 12 months. The segment is growing fast, and we saw a recent uptick in May. We’ve seen a few interesting increases in August 2024, November 2024, and May 2025. The majority of the increase, and traffic overall, comes from ChatGPT. I haven’t had a chance to look into why we’re seeing more visitors from them, but the timing makes me wonder if they fixed some of the issues I called out related to them not sending referral data. This data is for the last 30 days. The vast majority of the signups are from ChatGPT. That’s crazy right? 12.1% of signups from 0.5% of the traffic. This channel performs really well for us. As I mentioned earlier, AI search visitors convert 23x better than traditional organic search visitors for Ahrefs. Search engines tell us AI search traffic is higher quality, but is it? I already showed that AI search traffic was our highest performing channel for conversions / visit, but what about user metrics on the site? I’d say overall, yes, the traffic is better, but it’s a close call. Bounce rate and pages per visit are higher, but visit duration is worse. Less people bounce when coming from AI Search compared to Search. This could be because they’re further down their journey and ready to take action, at least judging by the conversion rate for these visitors. Users coming from AI search don’t spend as much time on the site as visitors from traditional search. This might be somewhat unique to us because we have the best blogs and videos in the industry. People really like our content and spend the time to consume our information and insights. Visitors from AI search go to 50% more pages than visitors from traditional search. I already showed that 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. There’s a big gotcha with the previous data. I did some rough calculations involving searches, platform users, and total estimated web traffic of search engines versus AI assistants, and modeled it versus our traffic from these different sources. Based on our data and these models, users from AI search click links 75% less than they do in traditional organic search. It might not be that bad, because much of the search traffic hasn’t shifted to AI assistants. A lot of their users are using it for other tasks like coding. If AI search becomes the default, our search traffic may be less than 25% of our current traffic. I’ll take it as long as the conversion rate remains higher, but I’m not sure it will scale in that way. If it did scale, we’d see more than 5x more conversions based on the higher conversion rate, and my gut tells me it won’t be quite that good. It seems I’m not the only one who feels this way. Our very own Ryan Law says: These CTRs are probably the highest they’ll ever be as the novelty of this format wears off. Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing, 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. Microsoft Bing I sure hope Bing is right. 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. Visitors from AI search to Ahrefs do seem to be higher quality and convert better than visitors from traditional search. We’re still processing the data for a larger study across many sites, and we’ll have that information for you soon.
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