AI sends 1% of website traffic – and most of it is from ChatGPT

AI referral traffic accounts for just over 1% of all website visits across 10 major industries, according to a new Conductor AI search benchmark report.

AI referral traffic. 1.08% of all web traffic came from AI referrals. Digging deeper:

• ChatGPT drove 87.4% of all AI referrals across the dataset.
• IT (2.8%) and Consumer Staples (1.9%) led all industries.
• Communication Services (0.25%) and Utilities (0.35%) saw the lowest shares.
• AI referrals increased by ~1% month over month across all industries.

AI answer engine market share. ChatGPT overwhelmingly dominated, followed by Perplexity.

• There were some interesting differences by industry (e.g., Gemini drove 21% of AI traffic in Utilities, while Copilot drove 5% in Financials).

AI vs. traditional traffic. Organic search continued to dominate site visits across all industries. Health Care (42.4%), Communication Services (39.6%), and Industrials (33.8%) had the highest organic share.

Why we care. Yes, organic search still drives the most traffic. But AI is becoming a performance channel. AI answers are shaping which brands people see and trust. If you’re invisible in AI answers, you’re invisible to your target audience/consumer. GEO/AEO/AI SEO may have a lot of overlap with SEO (for now), but ranking in Google doesn’t guarantee visibility in AI platforms like ChatGPT.

The brands AI cites most. Across 17 million AI answers and 100 million citations, AI highlighted different brands and domains than Google:

• Consumer industries: Retail giants dominated for product and shopping queries (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Chewy).
• YMYL categories (Health, Finance): AI cited authoritative sources (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, NerdWallet, Bankrate, Vanguard).
• Tech & B2B: Industry giants won on expert and professional queries (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Deloitte, McKinsey, SAP).
• Real Estate & Utilities: AI cited major authorities (Hines, Public Storage, CBRE, New Fortress Energy, GE Vernova).

AI Overviews benchmarks. Conductor also analyzed 21.9 million Google searches, and found:

• 25.11% triggered an AI Overview (5.5 million queries).
• Health Care (48.7%), Financials (25.7%), and Utilities (25.4%) had the most AI Overviews.
• Real Estate (4.4%) and Consumer Staples (6.8%) had the fewest AI Overviews.
• The five page types most often cited by AI Overviews were blogs, videos, articles, news, and product pages.

About the data. Conductor analyzed 13,770 domains across 10 GICS-aligned industries, looking at more than 3.3 billion sessions, 3.5 million AI prompts, 17 million AI responses and 100 million citations between May and September 2025 in the U.S. It also studied 21.9 million Google searches over four weeks (Sept. 15–Oct. 12, 2025) to measure how often AI Overviews appear and which page types get cited.

The report. The 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report