Guides / Paid impressions down, ChatGPT referrals up
Why paid search impressions are falling while ChatGPT referrals rise: a diagnostic guide for UK B2B ecommerce
By Olly, founder of AEOscore, AEO consultant and full-stack developer, 20+ years in search14 min read
Why are my Google Ads impressions falling in 2025 and 2026?
Read the video transcript
Before the budget meeting. Paid impressions falling, ChatGPT referrals rising. Which is real?
Three overlapping causes. One: measurement, broad match and Performance Max move impressions between campaign types. Two: layout, AI Overviews and AI Mode push ads down the page so fewer are served. Three: real shift, some buyers now ask assistants instead, and their prompts never reach a keyword report. Only one is real demand shift.
Impressions count how often Google drew your ad. That is a different thing from counting buyers. Check total orders before you touch the budget.
The triage, in an afternoon: chart 13 months of paid impressions, build the AI referral view in GA4, put revenue on the same chart. Six steps on the page; these three settle most cases.
Whatever GA4 shows for chatgpt.com is a floor, not a total. Assistants strip referrers, and some readers type your name into Google an hour later. Watch branded search too.
Revenue decides the response. Revenue flat: no emergency. Revenue down: find out who the assistants recommend instead.
Run the six-step triage: aeoscore.co.uk/guides/paid-search-impressions-falling-chatgpt-referrals-rising.
The short answer
Three causes overlap: your impression counts changed, the results page changed, and some buyers changed where they search.
- Cause 1, measurement: broad match, Performance Max and AI Max move impressions between campaign types, so a Search campaign can shrink while the account holds. Separately, Google's September 2025 removal of the num=100 parameter cut Search Console impressions, which is organic reporting, not Google Ads.
- Cause 2, layout: AI Overviews and AI Mode push ads down the page and mean fewer ads are served per query, so fewer ad impressions are counted. Seer Interactive measured paid CTR on AI Overview queries falling from 19.70% to 6.34% between June 2024 and September 2025.
- Cause 3, real shift: a share of buyers now research in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot instead of Google. Their forty-word prompts never appear in a keyword report, and the visits they send show up in GA4 as a small referral line that under-counts the truth.
Cause 1: Your impression numbers changed, but your demand did not
Some of the fall is bookkeeping: automation moved impressions between campaign types, and a separate Google change in September 2025 cut the impressions Search Console reports for organic search.
Start with the account total before any single campaign. Google’s own serving priority rules say an identical exact-match keyword wins first, then Google’s relevance rules apply, and eventually the auction goes to whichever campaign produces the highest Ad Rank, so broad match, Performance Max and AI Max for Search all take queries a tightly matched Search campaign used to win. Optmyzr found keyword overlap between Search and Performance Max in 91% of the 503 accounts it analysed in 2025. A Search campaign can lose a quarter of its impressions while the account total barely moves, and because Google Ads reports each campaign in isolation, the drop looks like a loss when it is a reallocation. Step 1 of the triage below shows you how to see it.
Then be careful with one change that gets blamed for everything. In September 2025 Google stopped honouring the &num=100 URL parameter, which had let rank-tracking tools load a hundred results at once. Search Console impressions fell sharply the same week, most likely because a lot of those tool-generated page loads had been counted as impressions, and average position looked as though it improved. One analysis of 319 properties found 87.7% lost impressions and 77.6% lost unique ranking terms. It was a Search Console change, and nothing in the reporting on it concerns Google Ads impressions. If your paid impressions fell too, look elsewhere for the explanation; blurring the two will send you chasing the wrong fix.
The market moved too, which is Cause 2’s territory but shows up in Cause 1’s numbers: smec’s Market Observer for European ecommerce had Search impressions down 3%, Performance Max down 11% and Shopping down 17% in Q1 2026 against Q1 2025, so some of your fall is simply the sector. The test for Cause 1 is impression share. If your Search impression share held while Search impressions fell, you kept your seat at the auction and the auction got smaller. Google’s own definitions of impression share and lost impression share (budget and rank) are the ones to use.
Cause 2: AI Overviews and AI Mode are compressing the paid real estate
AI answers now sit at the top of many results pages, push ads further down and mean fewer ads are served per query, so fewer paid impressions are counted even when the searches still happen.
Google’s own advertiser documentation says ads “are eligible to show above or below the AI Overview in all 200+ markets where AI Overviews are available”, which includes the UK, and within the AI Overview itself in twelve English-language markets that, as of August 2026, do not yet include the UK. You cannot target those placements and you cannot opt out of them, and “Google Ads currently doesn’t offer segmented reporting when ads show within Search AI Overviews”, so you cannot see the effect in your own account. At Google Marketing Live in May 2026 Google was still testing new Gemini-built ad formats inside AI Mode.
The space is different from a classic results page. An AI answer takes the first screen and fewer ads are served around it. Every ad that is not served is an impression that is not counted. Frederick Vallaeys put it plainly in Search Engine Journal in July 2026: “AI Mode and AI Overviews have eaten into the space where ads used to live. There are simply fewer impressions to go around”, alongside Optmyzr’s Q1 2026 benchmark showing impressions down 11% year on year across its accounts. UK agencies see the same thing: Leeds-based Trio Media wrote in May 2026 that “informational searches that previously drove ad impressions now resolve on the SERP”, and PPC Geeks described paid listings being pushed down by AI Overviews as early as July 2025.
The best dated measure of the effect on clicks comes from Seer Interactive, published November 2025: across 3,119 informational queries from 42 organisations, paid click-through rate on queries showing an AI Overview fell from 19.70% in June 2024 to 6.34% in September 2025, a 68% drop, while organic CTR on the same queries fell from 1.76% to 0.61%. Seer’s number covers informational queries and measures clicks rather than impressions, so read it as evidence of the mechanism: a page that earns a third of the clicks it used to is also a page where the ads sit lower and are seen less. The UK case that shows the mechanism most starkly is MailOnline’s: Press Gazette reported in May 2025 that its top-ranking desktop CTR fell from about 13% to under 5% when an AI Overview appeared (Press Gazette, May 2025).
How often does this hit commercial searches? More than the US averages suggest. Our own UK B2B study on 17 August 2026 (304 queries) found an AI Overview on 60% of supplier-intent searches and 96% of pricing searches; Ahrefs’ US figure for commercial queries in September 2025 was 4.3%, on a far larger and differently built query set (Ahrefs, November 2025). Semrush's July 2026 commercial search study found the share of US commercial results pages showing an AI Overview rose 71% between November 2025 and April 2026. Ofcom's Online Nation report (December 2025) puts AI Overviews on around 30% of UK keyword search queries. Read the full method and caveats on our AI Overviews and click-through research page.
Cause 3: Some of your buyers genuinely moved to prompts
A share of B2B buyers now do their research in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, where the question is a paragraph rather than three words, and none of it appears in a keyword report.
The numbers are large now. Ofcom found 54% of UK adults using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini in its April 2026 report, up from 31% the year before, and counted 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT between January and August 2025 against 368 million in the same months of 2024. On the B2B side the best UK figure is an agency survey: Magenta Associates reported in November 2025 that 66% of UK decision-makers already use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity to research and evaluate suppliers, with 45% calling them a primary channel, ahead of LinkedIn. It is agency-commissioned and thinly described, so weight it accordingly. A buyer who would once have typed “stainless bolts m8 supplier uk” into Google now asks an assistant for “a UK supplier of A4 stainless M8 hex bolts, DIN 933, that will do a trade account for a fabrication shop of eight people, with next-day delivery, and tell me roughly what a box of 100 costs delivered, including VAT”. Forty words, more purchase intent than any keyword you bid on, and it never registers as an impression anywhere.
Frederick Vallaeys made the argument for advertisers in Search Engine Journal in September 2025: when advertising shifts to prompts, “keywords aren’t vanishing, but their role is shrinking fast”, and the job becomes supplying the platforms with the product, price and audience signals they need to match a conversation. He cites a Google document putting AI Mode queries at two to three times the length of a traditional search. A practitioner view of the cost side comes from LinkedIn: in May 2025 Ben Somerville, co-founder of the Brisbane PPC agency farsiight, wrote that he had “completely changed” his view on B2B paid search and now cuts it hard where rising costs have outrun returns. He argues from cost, not from AI, and we disagree with the cut-first instinct for reasons in the decision table below; but the post shows how fast a settled view of B2B paid search is being rewritten.
Part of the rise in your referral line is ChatGPT itself changing: on 7 May 2026 it began showing more prominent brand links inside answers, and Similarweb measured ChatGPT referrals up 157.7% week on week on its desktop panel, with the share landing on brand homepages roughly doubling. Where these buyers land, they behave differently. Adobe Analytics data reported in January 2026 had AI-referred visitors converting 31% more than other traffic over the 2025 US holiday season, and Semrush’s 2025 study valued an AI-search visitor at 4.4 times an organic one by conversion rate on a set of digital-marketing topics. Both are consumer- or marketing-weighted and vendor-published, so treat the magnitude as directional. The direction is consistent across the recent datasets, though it was not always so: Adobe’s own series had AI-referred visitors 9% less likely to convert in March 2025 and only flipped positive later that year. It matches what you would expect once the research has been done before the click.
“The pattern to look for first in a UK B2B ecommerce account is Search impressions down, impression share flat, total orders flat. When you see it, demand did not go anywhere. The auction shrank and the buyers found another door.”
How to tell which cause is yours: a 6-step triage
Six checks, each under 30 minutes, tell you whether your fall is a reallocation, a layout change, a market change or a real move in where buyers search.
Pull 13 months of Google Ads impressions split by campaign type
In Google Ads, open Campaigns, set the date range to the last 13 months, add the Campaign type column and segment by month. Export to a sheet and chart Search, Performance Max, Shopping and Demand Gen as separate lines, plus the account total. Thirteen months gives you the same month last year as a control.
The tell: If the Search line fell but the account total held, impressions were reallocated (Performance Max, broad match, AI Max) rather than lost. If every line fell together, keep going.
Compare impression share with lost impression share, budget versus rank
Add the columns Search impression share, Search lost IS (budget) and Search lost IS (rank) to the same 13-month view. Impression share is the impressions you got divided by the impressions you were eligible for, so it tells you whether you kept your seat at the auction.
The tell: If impression share held or rose while impressions fell, the auction got smaller: fewer eligible impressions existed, and the cause sits in the market or on the results page rather than in your account. If impression share fell and lost IS (rank) rose, you are being outbid or out-scored, which is an ordinary PPC problem with ordinary fixes.
Compare against a market benchmark
Check a published benchmark for your market so you know whether the whole sector moved. For European ecommerce, smec's Market Observer pools EUR 450M+ of Google Ads spend and publishes impression, click and CPC movements: its Q1 2026 report had impressions down 3% for Search, 11% for Performance Max and 17% for Shopping against Q1 2025, with Search CPC flat. Optmyzr's Q1 2026 benchmark, quoted in Search Engine Journal in July 2026, had impressions down 11% year on year across its accounts. There is no UK-only B2B ecommerce equivalent yet; we intend to publish one.
The tell: If the benchmark shows impressions down across the market by a similar amount, your drop is structural and steps 4 to 6 matter more than any bid change. If the market is flat and you fell, look at your account first.
Build an AI referral view in GA4 and chart it against the paid line
GA4 added a default AI Assistants channel in May 2026, so start there: Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition, and look for the AI Assistants row. Then build the view that catches what it misses: open Explore, start a blank exploration, add the dimension Session source and the metrics Sessions and Key events, and add a filter: Session source matches regex, using the host pattern printed just below this list. Set the same 13-month range and break it down by month. Custom channel groups apply retroactively, so a channel built on the same rule gives you history the default channel is reported not to backfill.
The tell: A rising AI referral line beside a falling paid line is the pattern this guide is about. Treat the AI number as a floor: a large share of AI-driven visits land as Direct, for reasons covered below.
Check total revenue and total qualified enquiries, not channel revenue
Pull total orders, total revenue and total qualified enquiries for the same 13 months from your order system or CRM, not from GA4 channel reports. Put them on the same chart as paid impressions and AI referrals.
The tell: If total revenue and enquiries held or grew while paid impressions fell, demand did not fall: it is reaching you by a different route (AI answers, direct visits, branded search, organic). If totals fell in step with impressions, you have a real demand problem and paid is only where you noticed it first.
Check whether AI crawlers can actually reach your site
Open yourdomain/robots.txt and look for Disallow rules against OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot (the crawlers that decide whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude can cite you) and against GPTBot and ClaudeBot (the training crawlers, which many sites block on principle). Then check your CDN or firewall: since July 2025 Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default and asks every new domain at sign-up whether to allow them, and many WAF bot rules catch them too. Ask whoever runs the site to confirm, or, as a rough test, fetch a key page with the user agent set to GPTBot. Google-Extended is a separate case: blocking it limits Gemini training and grounding but, by Google's own documentation, does not affect Google Search, AI Overviews or AI Mode.
The tell: If any of these are blocked, the assistants cannot read your pages, so they answer buyer questions from other sites and your AI referral line stays flat no matter how good the pages are. Unblocking is the cheapest fix on this list.
How do I track ChatGPT referral traffic in GA4?
Read the AI Assistants row GA4 added to its default channels in May 2026, then create an exploration or a custom channel group filtered to Session source matching chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, claude.ai to catch the ChatGPT visits that arrive tagged but unclassified, and compare that trend line against your paid impression trend over the same 13 months.
The filter, ready to paste into a GA4 exploration or a custom channel group rule (condition: Session source, matches regex):
chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|claude\.ai
Two things to know about the defaults. First, GA4 gained an AI Assistants default channel in May 2026 (medium ai-assistant) that catches referrers Google recognises, but the list is unpublished, it excludes Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode (those clicks arrive as google / organic), and before it, AI visits that carried a referrer sat in the Referral channel. Second, ChatGPT appends utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it shows, usually with no medium, and Google’s own documentation says a missing UTM parameter reports as (not set), which is why practitioners find those sessions in Unassigned. Filtering on Session source, as above, sidesteps both problems; Google’s custom channel groups and explorations pages cover the clicks, and Seer Interactive’s running notes on where AI traffic hides are the best practitioner reference. A longer step-by-step is planned as a follow-up guide; the regex above is the whole trick.
What the numbers usually mean: a decision table
Match your pattern in the left column to the likely cause and the first thing to do.
Quick triage
Which cause is yours?
Answer from the six checks above. The result is one row of the table below.
Pick an answer to each question and the likely cause appears here.
| Pattern you see | Likely cause | First action |
|---|---|---|
| Search impressions down, account total flat, Performance Max or AI Max up | Reallocation between campaign types (Cause 1) | Report the account total alongside the Search campaign, and add campaign type to your monthly report so it stops surprising you. |
| Impressions down, impression share flat or up | The auction shrank: AI Overviews and AI Mode showing fewer ads per query, or the market cooled (Cause 2) | Check the market benchmark. Stop bidding up to buy back volume that no longer exists; move that budget to bottom-funnel and defence terms. |
| Impressions down, impression share down, lost IS (rank) up | You are being outranked in the auction: an ordinary PPC problem | Quality Score, ad relevance, landing pages and bids. Nothing to do with AI. |
| Impressions down, AI referrals up, total revenue flat or up | Routing change: buyers reach you through AI answers and direct visits (Cause 3, benign) | Do not cut paid on this evidence. Fix crawler access, make key pages quotable, and start measuring AI visibility. |
| Impressions down, AI referrals up, total revenue down | Real demand shift and you are not being named in the answers (Cause 3, urgent) | Find out which engines mention rivals and not you, then work the fix list: crawler access, answer-shaped pages, third-party mentions. |
| Organic impressions in Search Console fell off a cliff in September 2025, paid barely moved | The num=100 reporting change; demand did not move | Annotate the date in your reports and compare Search Console only from October 2025 forwards. |
“The most expensive mistake is cutting paid budget before checking whether total demand actually moved. You turn a measurement problem into a real one, and you do it in the month your rivals' ads get cheaper.”
What to do in the next 30 days
Change three things at once: how the paid budget is spent, how the site answers buyer questions, and what you measure.
In paid
- Cut or pause the top-of-funnel research keywords that assistants now answer for free ("what is", "how does", "best way to"). Their impressions were the first to go and their conversion rate was always the worst.
- Hold or increase spend on bottom-funnel and competitor-defence terms: product names, part numbers, "buy", "supplier", your rivals' brand names. Those searchers have finished researching.
- Add campaign type and impression share to your monthly reporting so reallocation is visible, and annotate September 2025 in every Search Console chart.
- Read Google's ads-in-AI documentation so your team knows where ads now show, and let broad match and Performance Max compete for AI Overview and AI Mode placements rather than fighting them.
On the site
- Unblock the AI crawlers in robots.txt and your CDN: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot. Leave Google-Extended alone unless you have a training-data reason; blocking it does not affect AI Overviews or AI Mode.
- Rewrite the top ten buyer-question pages (pricing, lead times, minimum orders, compatibility, delivery) so the first sentence under each heading answers the question outright, because the first sentence is what an assistant can quote cleanly.
- Get your business named on the pages assistants already cite for your category: directories, trade bodies, comparison articles, review sites. Assistants build recommendations from the pages they already cite for your category, and most of those pages are not yours, which is why third-party mentions matter so much.
Start measuring
- The GA4 AI referral view from step 4, checked monthly and treated as a floor.
- Branded search impressions in Search Console: some people who read your name in an AI answer search for you by name later, so that line is an early indicator that AI answers are working for you.
- A "How did you hear about us?" field on the enquiry and checkout forms with an option for AI assistants (ChatGPT, Google AI answer, Perplexity, Copilot).
- Which engines mention you, and which mention your rivals instead, on the questions your buyers actually ask. None of the reports above can show you this.
How do I get my brand mentioned in ChatGPT answers?
You need three things in place: AI crawlers must be allowed to fetch your pages, your key pages must answer buyer questions in extractable plain language, and you need third-party mentions on the sites those assistants already cite.
The order matters. Crawler access is a ten-minute check and it gates everything else: the crawler documentation from OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic names which bot does search and which does training, Google’s pages on Google-Extended and AI features confirm that AI Overviews and AI Mode need nothing beyond ordinary Googlebot access, and Cloudflare’s July 2025 default is the block to look for first. Answer-shaped pages are a month of writing. Third-party mentions are the slow, compounding part, and the part your own domain cannot substitute for; our guide to protecting B2B leads from AI Overviews walks the fix list in order.
Why AI referral traffic under-reports, and how much
The AI referral line in GA4 is a floor, not a total: a large share of AI-driven visits arrive with no referrer and land as Direct, and some never click at all.
Three things hide the traffic. First, in-app browsers and some assistant clients do not pass a referrer, so the visit has no source and GA4 files it as Direct. Second, a visitor who reads your name in an answer and then searches for you by name shows up as branded organic traffic, with no trace of the assistant. Third, some buyers never click: they get the price range, the lead time or the recommendation from the answer and phone or email you, which is a visit that never existed. ChatGPT tags many of its outbound links with utm_source=chatgpt.com (extended to its “More” sources panel in June 2025), which is probably one reason its line looks bigger than everybody else’s and why the others are under-counted more.
How much? Nobody has a clean market-wide number, and we will not invent one. The vendor samples that exist disagree widely: Clickport Analytics found 35.7% of AI-search sessions arriving with no referrer in a 371,847-session April 2026 sample from its customer sites (2,619 of them AI), and cites Loamly’s February 2026 sample of 20,428 AI visits at 70.6%. Both are small vendor datasets rather than benchmarks, so the defensible reading is “somewhere between a third and two-thirds, depending on the site and how mobile its audience is”, and that is before counting the branded searches and phone calls the answer prompted. The practical answer is to read three lines together: the AI referral view, Direct traffic to deep pages that used to get almost none, and branded search impressions in Search Console. When all three rise while paid impressions fall, the routing story is confirmed even though no single line proves it.
“Whatever GA4 shows you for chatgpt.com is a floor, not a total. Assistants open links in in-app browsers, strip referrers, or the visitor reads the answer and types your name into Google an hour later. Count the branded search line as well and the picture changes a lot.”
How AEOscore helps
AEOscore measures the number none of the above can show you: which AI engines mention your business, and which mention your rivals instead, on the questions your buyers ask.
Every week it runs your buyers' questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, scores the answers, and writes the fix plan for every gap. Unlike monitoring-only tools, on the top tier a named UK expert spends a day a month implementing the fixes with you: the crawler access, the answer-shaped pages, the listings and the third-party mentions. It is a UK service priced in pounds, from £99 a month; details and pricing are on the pricing page and how the score works.
If you have run the six checks and landed on Cause 3, the free AEO score tells you within two working days whether the assistants name you at all. No card, no signup.
FAQ
- Does a fall in paid impressions mean my demand is falling?
- No: check total revenue and total enquiries first, because impressions can fall while demand holds if buyers are reaching you through AI answers, direct visits or organic instead.
- How do I tell if it is a reporting change or a real drop?
- Compare your impression share and lost impression share: if impression share stayed flat while impressions fell, the total auction volume shrank rather than your competitiveness, and if the fall is in Search Console rather than Google Ads, check whether it starts in September 2025, when Google removed the num=100 parameter.
- Why is my ChatGPT referral traffic under-counted?
- Many AI assistants open links in in-app browsers or strip referrer data, and some visitors read the answer then type your name into Google, so a large share of AI-driven visits land in GA4 as Direct or as branded organic, meaning your visible referral number is a floor, not a true total.
- Do ChatGPT referrals convert better than paid clicks?
- Nobody has published a clean AI-versus-paid comparison, but the published data says AI-referred visitors convert better than other traffic: Adobe Analytics reported them converting 31% more than other sources over the 2025 US holiday season and Semrush's 2025 study valued an AI-search visitor at 4.4 times an organic one, because the assistant has already answered the research questions and the person arrives closer to a decision; measure it on your own site before you bank it.
- Should I cut my paid search budget because of this?
- Not automatically: cut only the low-intent research keywords that AI assistants now answer for free, and hold or increase spend on bottom-funnel and competitor-defence terms where a buyer is ready to purchase.
- How long does it take to improve AI visibility?
- Plan on 4 to 12 weeks before AI answer mentions move measurably after you fix crawler access and restructure key pages, with the engines that search the live web (ChatGPT search, Perplexity) tending to pick up changes before Gemini, and how fast depends on how many other sites already mention you.
Sources
- 77% of sites lost keyword visibility after Google removed num=100: data. Search Engine Land (Danny Goodwin), reporting Tyler Gargula's LOCOMOTIVE Agency analysis of 319 properties, 18 September 2025. Search Console (organic) data only; the article says nothing about Google Ads impressions.
- About impression share. Google Ads Help, read 18 August 2026.
- Get impression share data (Search lost IS budget and rank definitions). Google Ads Help, read 18 August 2026.
- About ad group and asset group prioritization within a Google Ads account. Google Ads Help, read 18 August 2026.
- Is Performance Max cannibalizing your Search campaigns?. Optmyzr (Frederick Vallaeys), 31 July 2025. 503 accounts, February 2025 data, mostly US.
- smec Market Observer: Google Ads benchmarks for European ecommerce. smarter-ecommerce.com, Q1 2026 report (Q1 2026 vs Q1 2025), landing page refreshed weekly. Pooled EUR 450M+ Google Ads spend, European ecommerce, no UK split.
- Surviving the impression squeeze: how agentic commerce is changing Google Ads in 2026. Search Engine Journal (Frederick Vallaeys, citing Optmyzr's Q1 2026 Google Ads Benchmark Report), 14 July 2026.
- About ads and AI Overviews. Google Ads Help, read 18 August 2026.
- A new generation of ads for the AI era of Search. Google, The Keyword (Google Marketing Live 2026), 20 May 2026.
- AIO impact on Google CTR: September 2025 update. Seer Interactive, 4 November 2025. 3,119 informational and educational queries, 42 organisations, June 2024 to September 2025.
- How AI, PPC and SEO work together in 2026. Trio Media, Leeds (Claire Daniels), 27 May 2026.
- Ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode: a new era of search advertising. PPC Geeks (UK), 9 July 2025.
- What triggers AI Overviews. Ahrefs, 10 November 2025. 146.1M US desktop SERPs, September 2025.
- AI Overviews in commercial search: study. Semrush, 2 July 2026. 600k US desktop keywords, November 2025 to April 2026.
- Online Nation 2025: from apps to AI search, how the UK goes online in 2025. Ofcom, 10 December 2025.
- AI Overviews and click-through rates for small UK B2B: our 304-query UK study. AEOscore, 17 August 2026.
- Google AI Overviews lead to dramatic reduction in click-throughs for MailOnline. Press Gazette (UK), May 2025.
- Search Forward: how AI is reshaping the B2B buyer journey. Magenta Associates (agency survey of UK decision-makers), November 2025. Agency-commissioned; sample and method thinly described.
- ChatGPT referral traffic triples after link change. Similarweb (Adelle Kehoe), 25 May 2026. Desktop clickstream panel, 30 April to 20 May 2026, global.
- UK adults' media and online lives revealed: passive social media use, AI companionship and online side hustles. Ofcom, April 2026.
- When advertising shifts to prompts, what should advertisers do?. Search Engine Journal (Frederick Vallaeys), 15 September 2025.
- I've completely changed my view on paid search (LinkedIn post). Ben Somerville, co-founder of farsiight, 27 May 2025.
- Traffic to US retail websites from generative AI sources jumps 1,200 percent. Adobe Analytics (Adobe blog), 17 March 2025. At that point AI-referred visitors were 9% less likely to convert than other traffic; the series flipped positive later in 2025.
- AI is driving more online traffic, conversions and revenues, Adobe Analytics says. Digital Transactions, reporting Adobe Analytics holiday 2025 data, 12 January 2026. US retail sites; vendor-published.
- AI search visitors are worth 4.4x traditional organic visitors: study. Semrush (Rachel Handley), first reported June 2025, page dated 21 July 2025. Based on conversion rate across 500+ digital marketing and SEO topics; not ecommerce.
- Default channel group (includes the AI Assistants channel). Google Analytics Help, read 18 August 2026.
- Google Analytics adds AI Assistants as a default channel group. Search Engine Journal (Matt G. Southern), 14 May 2026.
- Collect campaign data with custom URLs (missing UTM parameters report as (not set)). Google Analytics Help, read 18 August 2026.
- Your AI traffic is hiding: are AI sites like ChatGPT sending your website traffic?. Seer Interactive (Jonathan Wehausen), updated 22 June 2026.
- Custom channel groups. Google Analytics Help, read 18 August 2026. Includes Google's own 'AI assistants' custom channel example.
- Get started with Explorations. Google Analytics Help, read 18 August 2026.
- Why ChatGPT traffic shows as Direct in GA4. Clickport Analytics (David Karpik), updated 21 May 2026. Vendor dataset: 371,847 sessions on its customer sites in April 2026, 35.7% of AI traffic with no referrer; also cites Loamly's February 2026 sample of 20,428 AI visits at 70.6%. Neither is a market benchmark.
- OpenAI crawlers: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User. OpenAI developer documentation, read 18 August 2026.
- Perplexity crawlers: PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User. Perplexity documentation, read 18 August 2026.
- Does Anthropic crawl data from the web? ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User. Anthropic help centre, read 18 August 2026.
- Cloudflare just changed how AI crawlers scrape the internet-at-large. Cloudflare press release, 1 July 2025. New domains are asked at sign-up whether to allow AI crawlers, with block as the default; existing zones keep their settings.
- Google's common crawlers (Google-Extended). Google Search Central, read 18 August 2026.
- AI features and your website. Google Search Central, read 18 August 2026.
Figures were verified against each source on 18 August 2026 and are re-checked quarterly; the updated date at the top of the page moves when they change.
Revenue dipped while paid impressions fell?
That is the one pattern on this page worth acting on quickly, because it usually means the AI assistants are recommending somebody else. Send your domain and a named expert will run your buyers' questions through all six engines and email you which ones name you, which name your rivals, and what to fix first. Free, within 1 to 2 working days, no card, no signup.
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode