Is AI Visibility a Marketing BoonDoggle?
Should every marketer be putting 80% of their effort into AI visibility? Should we be throwing billions at tracking AI recommendations? Should companies restructure their budgets around appearing in AI tools? Probably not.
Three new studies came out in the last week showing us some truly concerning data:
- GEO is a Distraction from Marie Haynes – https://www.mariehaynes.com/geo-is-a-distraction/
- How much traffic do AI Assistants send from SEOWorks UK – https://www.seoworks.co.uk/downloads/ai-referral-traffic-benchmark/
- Does AI drive more direct traffic from Kevin Indig – https://www.growth-memo.com/p/does-ai-drive-more-direct-traffic
The conclusion: Traffic from AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot, Deepseek, Perplexity, etc.) is nearly non-existent. And worse, even if you account for dark traffic and sessions that AI recommendations influence indirectly (e.g. an AI recommends a brand and you later Google that brand or type in the domain), it’s vanishingly small.
What we believe: AI is, probably, quite influential on some buyers in some sectors. As Mike King wisely noted in a follow-up to these, AI is more like a brand channel, a digital billboard if you will, and it should be invested-in and measured as such. This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard digs into the three studies, their conclusions, and the risk that many marketers might be taking by investing in AI like a traffic channel.
Transcript:
Is AI visibility a bunch of malarkey? Is it a marketing boondoggle? There’s three recent studies that suggest maybe.
So, this is from Marie Haynes; she wrote on October 21, that “GEO is a distraction.” So here’s what she looked at. Twelve months of data across 100 different websites and whether they received any substantial AI traffic. And the answer is 0.62% from ChatGPT. If you include all LLMs, it’s 0.73. That is less than DuckDuckGo. If you’re obsessed with AI traffic, you better be obsessed with DuckDuckGo traffic too, because boy, howdy. You know, we’re talking about a few dots out of out of a thousand.
Conversions. Well, conversion rate, yes, ChatGPT visitors on all these sites she looked at were higher, but Google still draws 97% of the total conversions, 27 times more than all LLMs combined. Again, vanishingly small.
Marie put together this graphic looking at essentially what was expected during those years of 2223, 2425, like that expected growth curve. And then what’s actually happened over the last year, year and a half.
Again, it just doesn’t look good. I think this is why her conclusion is that AI visibility, what she calls GEO, is a distraction. Okay. Another study.
How much traffic do AI assistants actually send? Does it convert better? I know you’re about to ask, well, it’s not about traffic. Don’t worry. I’m going to get there too.
This study looked at a different subset of websites and again, organic search 39 times more traffic, AI traffic converted worse than organic on 23 of the 63 websites that SEO Works looked at.
They’re looking at 95 websites, so nearly the same number that Marie is, twelve months from September 2025 to to August 2026. You you can see once again, same conclusion that, boy, if you’re counting it on a traffic basis, AI just doesn’t look great.
Kevin Indig did something different with his study a couple of days ago, just published on Search Engine Land as well, but he published in his Growth Memo newsletter. And he is looking at at essentially the question of what if traffic sent from LLMs is not the number, those like 0.5 or 0.6 of traffic. Maybe that’s not the number. Maybe what happens is people to an AI, they hear about a brand, and then they go to Google and search for it, or they type in the domain name directly, and they do that with higher propensity than they used to because of the LLM’s answer. So you can go through his whole report. He really, really tried here to find a silver bullet.
The correlation initially maybe looked good, but he’s not sure. And, and so here I’m gonna read you the answer. I found that the amount of direct traffic to long tail pages in my sample driven by AI is not detectable yet. We cannot yet find a reliable between AI visibility and branded search or direct traffic.
Some companies with outstanding AI growth might be able to see it, but across the 12 sites in different sectors, he couldn’t find it. Now, I did do a little bit more research dug around in Gemini and Google’s AI mode. I found the best that AI could come up with in terms of other studies were things like this, which questionable. They are case studies in that they claim to show increases in visibility, but no increase in conversions or sales or traffic.
There are things like this. This one’s actually from Go Fish Digital, who I’ve I’ve long admired and thought very highly of. They don’t say who the company is, but they claim that there was significant growth in AI visibility and significant growth in conversions from the AI referrals. We just don’t know what the baseline is. So if that baseline is small and Google’s still sending, know, 40, 50, 30 times as much, well, how much is really going on here? Maybe Marie is right and GEO AI visibility is a distraction.
I want to dig into this deeper, but I thought that I should surface these three studies because they’ve all come out in the last week and they are all asking a pointed question, which is, have we been chasing our tails here? Is AI visibility a boondoggle? Should you be rethinking where you put your effort? Is that probably Google if you care about search and traffic and very well might be.
