SEJ just published an article about brands saying they're getting increased traffic from LLM chatbots. This included some very impressive stats.
Viv, a period care brand, noticed a trend last summer when its website traffic increased by400%. Marketing director Kelly Donohue linked this to the rise of AI tools
This spike coincided with a study inEnvironment Internationalthat found harmful heavy metals in popular tampon brands. Viv’s blog posts about product safety gained visibility as people searched for safer options.
The increased traffic resulted in more sales, with Viv reporting a436%rise from these AI-driven referrals. This indicates that users actively clicked through to learn more and make purchases.
The first line is very confusing and without access to the person giving the quote, I'm not going to attempt to make assumptions about what it actually means. But the last sentence is, in my view, most important. They're saying traffic from AI chatbots is up 436%.
That's a big increase!
But there's no context around this. Aside from not knowing the time period, we also don't know the raw numbers. It's entirely possible they were getting single digit traffic before and now are getting double digit traffic. We also don't know how this relates to their overall traffic volume. Is it 10% of their traffic? 1%? 0.001%?
And that lack of context is why I'm writing this update. The point is not to diminish the popularity and future potential of these AI tools. But to try and keep expectations in check.
We regularly see this sort of thing being reported, whether it's about AI or any other marketing topic du jour, and see expectations get quickly out of control.
Suddenly people will be thinking something is wrong with their website or marketing strategy because they're not seeing huge spikes in overall traffic.
So here's some context to better set expectations for now (the "for now" part is key, because it's reasonable to assume these numbers will grow, likely exponentially).
ChatGPT Usage
We don't have very reliable usage statistics for any AI tool. But ChatGPT being by far the most popular, let's focus on them.
ChatGPT reportedly has over 10 million paid subscribers and over 300 million weekly active users. Most of those people use the app at most once a week.
The platform also reportedly hit over 1 billion queries per day.
While we don't have query-level data, it's very safe to assume the vast majority of these queries are not using the web search feature and are not people actively looking for websites.
Side note, I am probably missing something here, but if 300 million users are using ChatGPT per week, and most of them do not use the app daily, I'm struggling with how we end up with 1 billion daily searches. It would seem there must be a small percent of users that are using it hundreds of times a day. Or we're counting automated API calls in that number (though OpenAI specifically says "user messages"). I get that the relatively small number of power users is the answer, but the daily number is so high that it is tough to process.
Google Usage & How it Compares
Meanwhile, Google is at around 8.5 billion searches a day. But that 8.5x number really doesn't tell the full story. According to a SparkToro study, over 37% of searches on Google result in a click to a non-Google web property. A disappointingly low number to search marketers, but as far as anyone can tell or reasonbly guess, this is orders of magnitude higher than what happens with ChatGPT.
To show how this compares in terms of actual traffic, I looked at all of the GA4 accounts we have access to.
- 25% of traffic comes from Google Organic
- 0.003% of traffic comes from ChatGPT
What Now?
What do you do with this data? Soak it in and relax. Our analytics data is a very small dataset relative to the internet at large. Hugely popular informational/news sites likely have much higher numbers of visits coming from AI. But the numbers are still going to be small relative to Google.
That will probably change. And it will probably change pretty quickly (next few years?). Or something else will come along and usurp everything we have available today.
But the important takeaway is that when you see "400% growth from AI chatbot traffic!" that you put that in perspective. You can have 400% growth from these sources but still not have it move your overall traffic by a single percentage point. For almost every website, regardless of how good or bad your marketing approach is, this is not moving the needle today.
You should still focus on it likely being a serious traffic source in the future.
