New research suggests that appearing in ChatGPT and other AI answers can influence what people do next, even when they never click a link from the AI tool itself.

For years, SEO had a relatively straightforward objective: Someone searched Google. Your website appeared. They clicked. Your analytics recorded an organic visit.

AI is changing that journey.

A potential customer might now ask ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity or another AI tool for advice, compare several options within the answer, discover a company they’ve never encountered before and then leave.

No click. No referral.

Nothing obvious in Google Analytics to suggest that the AI interaction achieved anything.

It would be easy to conclude that appearing in the AI answer didn’t matter.

New research from Similarweb suggests precisely the opposite.

Being recommended by AI makes someone 2.5x more likely to visit your website

Similarweb’s 2026 Downstream Impact of AI Visibility research followed real users after they asked ChatGPT questions relating to finance, travel and beauty.

Importantly, the research wasn’t limited to people who clicked a link in ChatGPT.

Similarweb followed people who received an AI brand recommendation and looked at what they did over the following seven days.

The result was striking.

People who were recommended a brand by AI were 2.5 times more likely to visit that brand’s website within the following seven days.

The researchers specifically excluded people who had previously visited the brand or mentioned it in their original prompt, helping to isolate genuine influence from people who already knew what they were looking for.

And when ChatGPT recommended the competitor instead? The subsequent traffic shifted towards the competitor.

That makes visibility in AI answers much more than a vanity metric. It is influencing real behaviour.

But here’s the really interesting part

Where did those visitors come from? Mostly not ChatGPT.

Similarweb found that 55.9% of AI-influenced traffic subsequently arrived through search.

For visitors without that prior AI influence, search accounted for around 40.4%.

In other words, someone might:

Ask ChatGPT → discover your company → leave ChatGPT → Google your company → visit your website

Your analytics then says: Organic search

What it doesn’t tell you is: ChatGPT created the demand.

This creates a significant attribution problem for businesses trying to understand whether investing in AI visibility is worthwhile.

If we’re only measuring clicks directly from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, we could be substantially underestimating AI’s role in customer acquisition.

And AI-influenced visitors aren’t just arriving

They’re engaging.

Similarweb found that visitors who had previously encountered a brand through AI viewed nearly twice as many pages and spent approximately twice as long on the website as standard visitors.

That makes intuitive sense. The AI conversation has already done some of the work traditionally performed by the website. The visitor may already know who the company is, what it offers and why it might be relevant to them.

By the time they search for the brand, they’re not necessarily discovering it. They’re investigating it.

Meanwhile, Google itself is becoming an AI search engine

This isn’t only about people moving from Google to ChatGPT. AI is appearing inside Google itself.

Research by Pew Research Center analysed 68,879 Google searches and found that 18% generated an AI summary. For longer, more conversational searches, the proportion was dramatically higher.

Only 8% of searches containing one or two words produced an AI summary.

For searches containing 10 words or more, that jumped to 53%. That’s particularly important because longer questions often represent exactly the type of searches businesses want to appear for.

People aren’t simply searching:

“accountant Cheltenham”

They’re asking questions more like:

“What’s the best type of accountant for a small limited company with employees?”

Or: “Which project management software is best for a small marketing agency?”

Or: “What’s the best family hotel near Legoland for children under 10?”

These are recommendation and decision-making searches.

And increasingly, an AI-generated answer may sit between the question and the websites that traditionally answered it.

Google AI Overviews are changing click behaviour too

The same Pew research found a significant difference in what people do after seeing an AI-generated summary.

When there was no AI summary, users clicked a traditional Google search result in 15% of visits.

When an AI summary appeared, that fell to 8%.

Only 1% of visits to a page containing an AI summary resulted in a click on a source link within the AI summary itself.

Separate research from Ahrefs paints an even starker picture.

In April 2025, Ahrefs analysed 300,000 keywords and estimated that the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% reduction in click-through rate for the number one organic result.

When Ahrefs repeated its analysis in 2026, it estimated the reduction had grown to around 58%.

So businesses face an unusual situation. Being visible within AI is becoming more important at exactly the same time that getting the click is becoming harder.

Which is why we need to stop measuring SEO purely in clicks

Traditional SEO has conditioned us to think:

Ranking → Impression → Click → Website visit → Conversion

AI discovery can look more like:

Question → AI recommendation → Brand awareness → Further research → Branded Google search → Website → Conversion

Or: Google search → AI Overview → Brand mention → Later direct visit → Conversion

Or even: Several AI conversations → shortlist → brand search → purchase

The website visit hasn’t disappeared. The journey to it has changed.

And our analytics tools don’t necessarily understand what happened before the visit.

AI traffic itself is growing rapidly

There is direct traffic coming from AI tools too, and that is growing quickly.

Adobe found that traffic from generative AI sources to US retail websites increased 12x between July 2024 and February 2025.

By May 2025, Adobe reported that retail AI referral traffic was 35x higher than it had been in July 2024.

And the quality of those visitors was interesting too.

In May 2025, Adobe found AI-referred retail visitors had:

27% lower bounce rates

38% longer visits

10% more page views

than visitors arriving from non-AI sources.

The trend continued into the 2025 festive season.

Adobe subsequently reported that generative AI traffic to retail sites increased 693.4% year on year during November and December 2025.

More importantly, those visitors were no longer converting less effectively.

During the 2025 holiday season, Adobe found AI-referred visitors converted 31% more than visitors from other traffic sources.

This is starting to look less like an experimental traffic source and more like a genuine customer acquisition channel.

So what exactly is AI SEO?

You’ll hear several names for it.

AI SEO.

AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation.

GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation.

Whatever terminology eventually sticks, the objective is broadly the same:

Making your organisation, products, services, expertise and content easy for AI systems to discover, understand, trust and recommend.

And this is where there’s an important misconception.

AI SEO isn’t about abandoning Google SEO and starting again.

In many cases, the things that help AI systems understand and trust a business overlap heavily with good SEO.

Clear website architecture.

Useful, original content.

Strong topical authority.

Accurate information about your organisation.

Structured information.

Good internal linking.

External references and mentions.

Reviews and reputation.

Content that directly answers the questions customers actually ask.

Technical accessibility.

Evidence and credible sources.

But AI introduces another dimension.

It’s no longer enough to ask:

“Does my webpage rank?”

We also need to ask:

“Does an AI understand who we are?”

“Does it associate us with the things we actually do?”

“Does it consider us credible?”

“Does it mention us when someone asks for recommendations?”

“Does it cite our content when answering questions in our area of expertise?”

And perhaps most importantly:

“What does it say about us?”

You don’t necessarily need to be the biggest brand to win

This is one of the more encouraging developments for smaller businesses.

Similarweb’s 2026 AI Brand Visibility research found that traditional brand size and AI visibility do not always align.

Specialist sites can outperform much larger competitors when they provide deep, specific information that genuinely answers the questions people are asking.

That creates an opportunity.

The companies that become useful sources of information for AI systems today could establish an advantage while many competitors are still concentrating exclusively on traditional rankings.

Traditional SEO isn’t dead

Far from it.

In fact, Similarweb’s research arguably makes traditional search more important in an AI-led customer journey, not less.

Remember that 55.9% of the AI-influenced visits Similarweb identified subsequently came through search.

AI generated the awareness.

Google facilitated the visit.

Your website still had to convince the customer.

These channels aren’t replacing one another neatly.

They’re becoming interconnected.

That’s why we think businesses should stop treating SEO and AI visibility as two separate strategies.

You need to be discoverable by search engines.

You need to be understandable by AI.

And you need a website that reassures and converts the person who eventually arrives.

There’s also a measurement problem we need to acknowledge

If your reports currently show very little traffic from ChatGPT, don’t automatically conclude that AI isn’t affecting your business.

Direct AI referrals are the part we can easily see.

Influence is harder.

Someone can discover you in ChatGPT today, search your name on Google on Thursday and contact you on Friday.

Google Analytics is unlikely to join those dots.

That means businesses need to start watching a broader set of signals, including:

AI citations and brand mentions

Visibility for important questions and topics

AI referral traffic

Branded search demand

Organic impressions and clicks

Direct traffic

Conversions from people who may have encountered the brand elsewhere

What ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI say when asked about your market

No single metric tells the whole story anymore.

The question has changed

A few years ago, the digital visibility question was:

“Are we on page one of Google?”

Then it became:

“Are we number one?”

Now there’s another question businesses need to start asking:

“Will AI recommend us?”

Because your next customer may not discover three companies by opening three blue links and comparing their websites.

They may simply ask an AI:

“Who should I use?”

If your competitor is in that answer and you’re not, the Similarweb research suggests the impact may extend much further than one missed click.

The customer may remember them.

Search for them.

Visit them.

And ultimately buy from them.

Your analytics might tell you Google generated the customer.

The journey may actually have started with AI.

Is your business visible in AI?

At AI Angels, we’re helping businesses understand how they currently appear across AI search and recommendation tools, where competitors are being recommended instead, and how existing SEO and content strategies need to evolve for AI-led discovery.

Traditional SEO still matters. AI SEO adds another layer: making sure that when your potential customers ask AI for information, advice or recommendations, your business has a chance of being part of the answer.