AI sends fewer visitors and better ones

Roughly one visit in seven hundred to the average website now arrives from an AI assistant. Semrush, looking at more than 50,000 sites across 2025, put the median share of traffic coming from AI systems at 0.14 per cent, against 16.04 per cent for organic search. If somebody has told you that AI search is eating your traffic, that is the number to keep in your pocket.

The other half of the picture is the interesting half. The few people who do arrive that way appear to be worth considerably more than the ones search sends. In an earlier study, Semrush put the average AI search visitor at 4.4 times as valuable as an average organic visit, measured on conversion rate. So the honest position for a B2B company in 2026 is this. AI is sending you almost nothing, and what it sends is the best traffic you have. The useful response is not to chase the volume. It is to make the site easy to check.

Does AI search traffic convert?

Better than the rest of your traffic, on the measurements published so far. Take the size of the effect with some salt. That 4.4x came out of more than 500 digital marketing and SEO topics and was published in July 2025, so it is one sector at one moment, and the sample is not your company. The direction has held wherever anyone has looked, though, and the reason for it is not mysterious.

Someone who types a query into Google is often still working out what they want. Someone who arrives from ChatGPT has already had that conversation. They described the problem, an assistant named three or four firms, and they have clicked through to see whether the description survives contact with your website. They are not at the top of a funnel. They are auditing a shortlist they did not know they were assembling.

AI does not send you browsers. It sends people who have already been told the answer and have come to find out whether it is true.

Your website has become a fact check

That is a different job from the one most B2B sites are built to do. Persuasion assumes the visitor has not made their mind up. Verification assumes they nearly have, and are looking for the detail that confirms it or the wobble that kills it. Verification is quicker, less forgiving, and much better served by specifics than by adjectives.

The work it asks for is plain, and none of it is new. Say what you actually do, in the words a client would use in an email, near the top of the page. Put the evidence where it can be read rather than requested: real projects, named where the client is happy to be named, with enough detail that a sceptic can tell they happened. We keep our case studies public for that reason and no other.

Keep one page that states the facts flatly. Ours is /llm-info: the registered company details, what the studio does, the sectors it works in, and a short list of the things we are not. It is not a clever trick to game an assistant. It is a page that makes it harder for anybody, human or machine, to describe us wrongly, which is worth doing whether or not ChatGPT ever reads it.

Then check that your claims agree with each other. The website, the LinkedIn page, the directory listing somebody set up in 2021 and forgot about. Language models are indiscriminate readers and cheerful repeaters. A contradiction you stopped noticing years ago is a contradiction they will carry for you.

What not to do about it

Do not put a target on the channel. A number sitting at 0.14 per cent of visits will not respond sensibly to being managed, and a team told to grow it tends to start producing the sort of writing that reads as though nobody was there.

Do not rebuild the site for machines either. Almost everything that makes a page legible to a language model, a clear heading, a direct sentence, a fact with a date attached, is the same thing that makes it legible to a person reading on a phone between meetings. Optimising for the robot at the human's expense gets you a page that neither one enjoys.

And be wary of anyone selling guaranteed citations in AI answers. The mechanism is opaque, it changes without notice, and nobody who genuinely understands it is in a position to promise you anything.

The bit that is actually new

It is smaller than the headlines and more demanding than the panic. A layer of software now reads your website, describes your company to a buyer you will never meet, and sends a handful of those buyers along to check the description. You do not get to edit what it says about you. You only get to make the truth about your business easy to find, hard to misread, and worth turning up for. That was a good strategy before any of this existed. It just has a second audience now.