The impact of AI search is bigger than you think

In May, we were very excited to see a huge increase in traffic from ChatGPT. If you check your website’s analytics, you might see the same thing.

The reason for the change is that ChatGPT started adding links when it mentioned a brand. This means that despite the big traffic gain, the actual visibility we were getting from the tool probably hadn't changed much. Before the update, we were still being mentioned, but people would have arrived at our site indirectly.

But this did highlight one point: the impact these tools are having on your business is likely to be much bigger than you think.

In fact, a quick search on ChatGPT reveals that many mentions still aren’t linked, and neither are searches on Claude or Gemini. The impact of AEO might not be showing up fully in your data yet, but it would be a big mistake to ignore it until it does.