If you have a working website, a blog, or a news page, it probably matters to you a lot from where your website visitors are coming from. For more than a decade, the answer of this question was simple: Google Search sends traffic to your website. But in last two to three years it has all changed, know a new type of traffic has started to appear in Google Dashboards all due to AI chatbots.
With a rapid growth of use of AI for regular searches, tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s own Gemini have started answering queries on search engines by mentioning website names or links in their answer. So that if users wants he can click on those links and reach website pages. When a user click the links shown by AI it shows in analytics report as “AI referral traffic” even though AI referral traffic is a small pie of total website visitors but it continues to grow rapidly.
For past few years, Perplexity was becoming the AI tool tool which sends traffic to your website. But Google Gemini has changed that story by being the second-highest source of AI traffic after ChatGPT in the world. This blogs explain how Gemini has pushed perplexity, what it means and what might happen in the future.
First we need to understand what is “AI Referral Traffic?”
When we search something on AI tools like ChatGPT along with its answer it give some website links or mention that “according to this website”. If you click on that link, you reach that website page where that information is written. The website can clearly track that the traffic or visitor has come from AI. This is known as AI referral traffic.
Know this visit is most important as these users have not landed on your website by accident rather AI has pointed your website to them. A recent research has found that AI referral traffic converts (signing up, buying, etc.) twice more than the regular search traffic. So even if a small number of people visit your website through AI referral traffic there changes of conversion is higher than other website sources.