Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
A new benchmark report from Conductor has revealed an interesting shift in how people discover websites. While organic search is still the clear leader, AI tools have quietly become a meaningful new source of traffic – and almost all of it is coming from one place: ChatGPT.
AI referrals: small share, growing fast
Across ten major industries, just over 1% of website visits came from AI platforms between May and September 2025. That may sound small, but it represents the beginning of a new behaviour: people using AI assistants instead of traditional search engines.
ChatGPT was responsible for a staggering 87% of all AI-driven traffic. Other AI tools such as Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot contributed the rest, but none came close to ChatGPT’s influence. Some industries saw stronger performance than others. IT and Consumer Staples gained the most traffic from AI answers, while sectors like Communication Services and Utilities saw very little.
Even so, AI referrals grew by around 1% month-on-month, showing that usage is steadily rising.
AI tools vs. traditional search
Despite the buzz around ChatGPT and similar tools, organic search is still the biggest source of website visits by far. In some sectors – such as Health Care and Communication Services – organic search drives over a third of all traffic.
But here’s the important shift: AI is becoming its own performance channel. The brands that appear in AI answers are shaping what users see, trust, and eventually visit. Ranking well on Google no longer guarantees visibility inside AI tools. If your brand isn’t showing up in AI answers, you’re quietly disappearing from a growing share of discovery.
AI Overviews: where Google is heading
The report also looked at Google’s own AI Overview feature, analysing 21.9 million searches. Around a quarter of all queries triggered an AI Overview, with Health Care searches leading the way. Interestingly, the types of pages most often cited by these overviews were common content formats: blogs, videos, articles, news stories, and product pages.
This suggests that Google is blending familiar SEO content with new AI-driven presentation, and brands with strong content libraries are more likely to be featured.
What this means for marketers
The message is clear: organic search remains essential, but visibility in AI platforms is becoming just as important. AI is now shaping which brands people discover first, particularly in categories where trust and authority matter.
Ensuring your content is accurate, credible, and helpful is no longer just good SEO practice – it’s how you stay visible in AI-powered answers. And as ChatGPT continues to lead the market, brands will increasingly need to consider how they appear across both search engines and AI assistants.
For a channel that barely existed a couple of years ago, AI-driven traffic is already proving it deserves attention.
