Most visitors an AI assistant sends to a website comes from one assistant. That same assistant cites about one in seven of the pages it reads. Put those two numbers side by side and you have a fair picture of where a business stands with AI right now.
Two sources lay it out, and they point to several more that are listed at the end. The first is Previsible's third AI Traffic Study, written up in Search Engine Land by co-founder David Bell. It covers 6.77 million AI-referred sessions across 166 Google Analytics properties from November 2024 through May 2026. The second is a statistics roundup from Cognizo that pulls together work from Similarweb, Adobe Digital Insights, eMarketer and Search Engine Land. I read both so you can skip to the part that matters for your business.
ChatGPT is the primary provider for referrals
Across Previsible's full dataset, ChatGPT accounts for 92.4% of trackable referral traffic from AI assistants. Every other assistant combined shares the remaining 7.6%. A separate dataset from Grips Intelligence, reported by eMarketer, landed almost on top of it: ChatGPT 92.2%, Gemini 5%, Perplexity 1.9%. Two independent measurements, one answer.
The total is growing fast. Monthly AI-referred sessions in the study grew 9.9 times, reaching 644,478 in May 2026.
Who sends AI visitors to websites
ChatGPT sends 92.4% of AI referral traffic
92.4% ChatGPT
7.6% every other assistant combined
How the field looked in December 2025
Share of AI referral traffic by platform, six months earlier
ChatGPT
about 84%
Perplexity
8.9%
Gemini
4.5%
Copilot
2.1%
Claude
0.6%
What moved underneath the leader
12.8x
ChatGPT
Referral growth over 19 months
64x
Claude
133 monthly sessions to 8,528. Passed Perplexity in March 2026.
3.2x
Gemini
Steady growth with almost no volatility
-61%
Perplexity
Down from its March 2025 peak of 17,507 monthly sessions
-96%
Copilot
8,651 monthly sessions in August 2025 to 339 in May 2026
The skinny: ChatGPT accounts for 92.4% of trackable AI referral traffic across 6.77 million sessions, leaving 7.6% for all other assistants combined. In December 2025 the split was ChatGPT about 84%, Perplexity 8.9%, Gemini 4.5%, Copilot 2.1% and Claude 0.6%. Over the study period ChatGPT referrals grew 12.8x, Claude 64x and Gemini 3.2x, while Perplexity fell 61% from its peak and Copilot fell 96% from its peak. Source: Previsible AI Traffic Study, 166 GA4 properties, November 2024 through May 2026, reported by Search Engine Land on July 6, 2026. Excludes Google AI Overviews. The 7.6% figure is 100% minus ChatGPT's share.
The surprise is underneath the leader. A year ago the smart money was on Perplexity as the search-native challenger and Copilot as the office default. Neither held. Claude grew 64 times over the study period and passed Perplexity in March 2026. Gemini kept climbing quietly. Perplexity and Copilot are both moving toward keeping people inside their own experience, where there’s no reason to send anyone to your website.
A click is only part of the story
That 92% counts clicks. It doesn’t count conversations. The study's author is careful about this. Gemini is built into Workspace and Android, so its referral numbers likely undercount how often people actually discover things through it. Perplexity and Copilot are moving toward browsers, agents and modes where the answer arrives and nobody needs to leave. And the study leaves out AI answers inside Google's own results entirely.
That matters for a local business. Your name can be said out loud in an assistant that never sends you a single visitor. The recommendation still happened. Your analytics just never heard about it.
Being read is different from being cited
The second lesson is about what happens before the answer. An AirOps analysis reported by Search Engine Land looked at 548,534 pages ChatGPT retrieved across 15,000 prompts. Only 82,108 of them were cited in a final answer. That’s 15%. The other 85% were read, weighed and dropped.
Retrieved versus cited
ChatGPT cites 15% of the pages it reads
15% cited in an answer
82,108 pages
85% read, then dropped
466,426 pages
Citation rate by the kind of question
Bars are drawn on a 0 to 20% scale
Product discovery
18.3%
How-to
16.9%
Validation
11.3%
How ChatGPT searches before it answers
89.6%
of prompts trigger two or more follow-up searches
32.9%
of cited pages show up only in those follow-up searches
55.8%
of cited pages rank in Google's top 20 for a related query
3.5x
more citations for Google position 1 than for pages outside the top 20
In context: Of 548,534 pages ChatGPT retrieved across 15,000 prompts, 82,108 (15%) were cited in a final answer and 466,426 (85%) were not. Citation rates were 18.3% for product discovery questions, 16.9% for how-to questions and 11.3% for validation questions. 89.6% of prompts triggered two or more follow-up searches, and 32.9% of cited pages appeared only in those follow-up searches. 55.8% of cited pages ranked in Google's top 20 for a related query, and pages in Google position 1 were cited 3.5 times more often than pages outside the top 20. Source: AirOps, reported by Search Engine Land, March 13, 2026.
Two details are worth considering. First, the kind of question changes your odds. Pages that help someone choose get cited more often than pages that confirm what a reader already believes. Second, ChatGPT rarely runs one search. Nearly nine prompts in ten fan out into follow-up searches, and about a third of the pages that end up cited came in through those follow-ups. The question your customer typed is only the first of several that got asked on their behalf.
Good news for anyone who has invested in search: more than half of cited pages already rank in Google's top 20. The old work still counts. It’s being read by a second audience now.
AI trusts what other people say about you
So which pages win the citation? A separate study from Peec AI, also reported by Search Engine Land, looked at 30 million sources cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Reddit was the most-cited domain of all, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn. Wikipedia and Forbes were also in the top five. Review platforms such as Yelp and G2 showed up often when the question was a recommendation.
Read that list again and notice what’s missing. Every name on it is a place where somebody else is doing the talking: customers, editors, neighbors, colleagues. A sales page describes a business the way the business would like to be described. Assistants go looking for the version other people wrote.
Trusted third-party sources
The sources AI cites most are places where other people talk
Across five AI platforms
The three most-cited domains, in order
1RedditCommunity discussion
2YouTubeVideo
3LinkedInProfessional network
Also in the top five
WikipediaReference
ForbesEditorial
ChatGPT on its own
Sources it favors
WikipediaReference
RedditCommunity discussion
Editorial sitesForbes and similar publications
Review platforms such as FullServiceReview.com, Yelp and G2 appear often when someone asks for a recommendation.
The details: In a Peec AI analysis of 30 million sources cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, Reddit was the most-cited domain, followed by YouTube and then LinkedIn. Wikipedia and Forbes were also in the top five. ChatGPT on its own favors Wikipedia, Reddit and editorial sites such as Forbes. Review platforms such as Yelp and G2 appear often in recommendation-style questions. No per-source percentage is available. Source: Peec AI, reported by Search Engine Land, March 31, 2026.
The mix shifts by assistant. ChatGPT leans toward reference and editorial authority. Google's AI results lean more toward Facebook and Yelp. Perplexity favors Reddit, LinkedIn and G2 for business questions. The common thread holds everywhere: independent voices outrank self-description.
Larger brands have noticed. Their budgets are moving toward digital PR and community presence, because those are the places assistants go to learn what real customers think. A local business already has a version of this within reach. It looks like a steady stream of reviews, a mention in the local paper or business journal, an active LinkedIn page, a video or two that answers a real question, and showing up helpfully when your town's subreddit asks who to call.
One company's update can move your numbers
Concentration comes with a cost. In November 2025, ChatGPT referrals in the Previsible study fell from 448,412 to 213,345 in a single month while every other platform held steady. Total sessions recovered by December. Nobody's website changed. The assistant did.
It works in the other direction too. On May 7, 2026, OpenAI began showing more prominent, clickable brand links inside answers. Cognizo, citing Similarweb data, reports that total ChatGPT referrals rose 157.7% week over week and referrals to brand homepages rose 354.7%. Homepages went from roughly 26 to 29% of all ChatGPT referral traffic to about 62 to 63%, and stayed there.
If most AI visitors now land on your homepage, your homepage has a new job. It needs to say who you are, where you are, when you’re open and what you charge, in plain words an assistant can lift and a person can trust.
The visits that do arrive are worth more
Adobe Digital Insights data, reported by eMarketer, shows visitors arriving at US retail sites from AI assistants converted 42% better than other traffic in March 2026. Those visitors also spent 48% more time on site and viewed 13% more pages per visit. People who arrive from an assistant have usually done their comparing already.
What this means for a local business
Start with ChatGPT, then keep going. It sends the visits today. Claude and Gemini are the two still growing in the referral data, and a recommendation in any assistant counts even when no click follows.
Treat your homepage as the front door for AI visitors. Name, location, hours, services and pricing belong in real text, near the top.
Take your About page seriously. In the Previsible data, 42.1% of AI-referred visits to health sites landed on About pages. Legal visits spread across blog, about, contact and location pages. People check who you are before they read what you say.
Publish your pricing. "Contact us for pricing" gives an assistant nothing to compare or recommend.
Answer the questions next to the question. Follow-up searches are where a third of citations come from. Cover what people ask right before and right after they look for a business like yours.
Earn mentions in places you don’t own. Reviews, local press, community threads, video and LinkedIn are where assistants look for what customers really think. Your own website confirms the facts. Other people supply the trust.
Ask how people found you. Add an AI option to your "How did you hear about us?" field. It catches the customers your analytics filed under direct visits.
This is the reason Full Service Review checks more than one assistant. A free AI Visibility score asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and others about your business and shows you their answers word for word, so you can see where you’re named and where someone else is. You can get your score in about a minute, or see which assistants read local businesses most.
What these numbers leave out
A few limits. The Previsible study counts referrals from standalone assistants only. It excludes AI answers inside Google's own results, which the author says almost certainly drive more AI traffic than every standalone assistant combined. Its 166 properties are mid-size and large sites in SaaS, ecommerce, finance, legal, health, insurance, education, publishing and ticketing. Your corner shop isn’t in the sample. And the conversion figures are for US retail.
None of that changes the shape of it. The clicks are concentrated in one assistant. Most of what it reads never gets cited. The pages that do get cited tend to have other people's voices behind them.
The numbers
AI assistant referral, citation and conversion statistics cited in this article
Measure
Value
Period
Source
ChatGPT share of AI referral traffic
92.4%
Nov 2024 to May 2026
Previsible
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity share of AI referral traffic
92.2%, 5%, 1.9%
Reported June 2026
Grips Intelligence via eMarketer
Referral share: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude
