Marketing analytics firm Ahrefs published a new study on Wednesday showing that traffic to websites that comes from AI platforms has a couple of marked differences compared to those coming from search engines.
The company said it analysed approximately 82,000 websites over the course of May and June to compare how AI traffic performs relative to other sources.
There were a couple of interesting data points in the study. Notably, users that come to a website via an AI platform have a higher bounce rate than search engines and compared to overall traffic from all sources.
AI users had a 67.8% bounce rate, compared to a 63.7% rate for search, and a 62.4% rate for overall traffic.
Another key fact was that AI users visit fewer pages on websites they visit. For AI sources the figure was 4 pages, compared to 5.2 for search and 5.5 for overall.
For individual sessions it was the same. AI users visit 2.27 pages per session, compared to 2.79 for search and 2.99 for overall users.
One area that was more positive was in time of site. Here AI users were actually at the top spot, averaging 86 seconds, compared to 78 seconds for both search and overall.
Is AI traffic better or worse?
It is hard to draw any big conclusions from the study but it is hard to square with what we’ve heard from Google. Executives at the search engine have consistently said that AI traffic is better but this doesn’t suggest that’s true.
For example, a higher bounce rate either means a user found the information they needed and left. Alternatively they didn’t get it and so left the website. You could draw a similar conclusion for the lower number of page visits.
All of this matters for brokers because so many of them have either set themselves up to rank in Google or have partnerships with SEO-driven affiliates who do the same.
If search queries no longer drive traffic to websites or reduce the quality of visitors, it could mean that those organic and affiliate-based strategies either cease to work or stop being as effective as they were in the past. It also means firms will have to start thinking about how to show up in AI-based queries.