Go on, open your analytics and count the visitors ChatGPT sent you last month. Did you see those numbers? In Similarweb’s study, those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg.
They found that only 8.8% of AI-influenced visits came directly from AI tools. Which makes you wonder where did the rest 91.2% visitors come from? Well, some researchers took this problem to heart. They likely closed the chatbot, went to double-check it on Google and somewhere in a Similarweb office, a researcher must have shouted ‘Eureka’!
They realized that users are only asking AI for recommendations then they are Googling your brand or typing your website’s address directly. Your analytics saw them show up later and gave credit to “organic” or “direct” traffic.
That’s what people mean by AI visibility: how often ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews name your brand or products when someone asks what to buy. If SEO was about getting your store onto the right shelf, AI visibility is about getting the shop assistant to point at it.
And the pointing seems to work. Similarweb found that users were 2.5x more likely (on average) to visit an AI-recommended brand than a direct competitor, and that held even after it excluded users who had visited the brand’s site in the prior four weeks or named the brand in their prompt.
Naturally, a whole fleet of AI visibility tools has set sail to measure the iceberg for you. But merchants who’ve already climbed aboard aren’t so optimistic. One marketer on Reddit put it bluntly:
“I went through that “dozens of prompts + spreadsheet” phase too and yeah, that version is 100% vanity.”
Which brings us to the question sitting under all that ice: does any of this turn into sales? The research can show you the visits. Whether those visitors pay, and whether they pay you or a competitor who caught them on the way back, takes a little more digging below the waterline.
Similarweb runs a panel of US desktop users who agreed to let it see where they browse. The data covers July to December 2025, and the team watched what happened after someone got a brand recommendation from ChatGPT. Downstream visits were tracked for seven days following the AI conversation.
Rand Fishkin, who contributed to the study, walked through a few of them in his SparkToro breakdown.
When AI recommended American Express as a credit card option, people were 7.2% more likely to visit its website. For Capital One, that figure was 14.2%. In other words, an AI recommendation can bring customers to your website even after they’ve closed the chat.
The more useful finding for you is how those people came back. According to Search Engine Land’s coverage, 55.9% of AI-influenced visits came through search, compared with 40.4% of non-AI-influenced visits. So when ChatGPT recommends you, the shopper’s next move is often a Google search for your name. That’s why anyone declaring SEO dead may want to hold the funeral. But know that AI visibility and SEO work like a relay team: ChatGPT runs the first leg and gets the shopper interested, then hands the baton to Google to finish the race. Even inside Google, the two overlap, since brand names mentioned in AI Overviews often link to organic search listings.
They also showed up ready to shop. AI-influenced visitors viewed 12 pages and spent 11.8 minutes on site, on average, compared with 6.5 pages and 5.6 minutes for non-AI-influenced visitors. That’s a shopper who has already done the research and is now double checking the goods.
Now, before you print all this on a mug, there’s one catch.
As Biggie famously put it, “Mo Money, Mo Problems.” For AI visibility, it’s more like “Mo’ Mentions, Mo’ Mystery.” Your brand could be popping up in AI recommendations all over the place and sending you more traffic than chips in a packet of Pringles, but that traffic is mostly useless to your bank account until it converts.
Also, Similarweb in its study sampled site visits, not sales or successful checkouts. To find out whether AI traffic actually buys, you need a second study, and luckily there is one. Researchers from the University of Hamburg and the Frankfurt School published a paper in Marketing Science that looked at 12 months (August 2024 to July 2025), 973 ecommerce sites, and $20 billion combined revenue.
Their verdict on ChatGPT referral traffic conversion rates was not flattering. Affiliate (+86%) and organic search (+13%) conversion rates were higher than ChatGPT; only paid social converted worse than ChatGPT.
Now, here’s another pickle that you need to swallow. Similarweb sells tools that track AI visibility, and in a separate report it estimated the conversion rate for visits referred by ChatGPT at 11.4%, compared to 5.3% for organic search. Conversely, the independent researchers found ChatGPT converting worse than organic search. You can draw your own conclusions about which study had a product to sell.
To be fair to ChatGPT, it’s improving. Its conversion rate improved during the study, although those gains were partly offset by customers spending less per order. Even so, the researchers didn’t expect ChatGPT to catch up with Google’s organic search conversion rate within the next year.
So, does AI visibility drive sales?
Well, it depends really. AI drives visits, and the visitors do look keen. But all said and done, my advice would be to skip the expensive AI visibility dashboard until you’ve checked the free signals we’ll cover below.
Remember how more than half of AI-influenced visitors later returned through search? Those search results can have a price tag, and your competitors are happy to pay it.
Yes, there’s a big gap between an AI naming your brand and the shopper actually reaching your store. In that gap, anyone with an ad budget can catch them.
A shopper can come to you through these four ways:
Remember: getting recommended by AI means little if your competitor steals the customer the moment they Google you. So, take active precautions to avoid that.
Now, if you are a retailer selling more than one manufacturer’s brands, you have a different problem.
When a shopper asks ChatGPT for the best robot vacuum, the AI recommends the robot vacuum, not your store. The shopper then buys it from the brand’s own site, from Amazon, or from whoever ranks first for the product name.
Merchant visibility shows whether you as a seller appears at all, while product visibility shows whether the product appears. Most resellers are chasing the second one and getting nothing from it.
You can’t out-brand the brand, so give the AI a reason to name you:
You don’t need a pricey tool to start. Here’s what to check, platform by platform:
AI visibility is real. It brings in shoppers who have already made up their minds, but many of them never show up in your reports as AI traffic. But nobody has yet conclusively proven if it rings the bell at checkout, and the shoppers it sends you can be poached by competitors on their way back.
So once the AI has done its part, the rest of the job is yours. Defend the way back, and give shoppers a hard to ignore reason to choose your store over everyone else who sells the same product.
.jpg)
M Khizar is a writer enjoys making complicated things feel simple. He writes about warranties, ecommerce, and the small details people usually overlook, until they matter. His work focuses on clarity and helping readers make smarter decisions without overthinking it. Outside of work, he enjoys reading, writing personal blogs, and binge eating with friends.
.jpg)
