Are AI Apps reducing your site's Google/Search referral traffic?

[born2run]

Hi so I noticed that many people are now searching on Artificial Intelligence apps (via voice in Chatgpt app) instead of searching on Google search (including myself).

I only use Google search to search for news articles for certain topics, or for shopping deals. Even shopping deals are going to be done by AI Agents who'll find you best deals for items you want to buy online.

So basically, referral traffic from search engines is going to crash, in my humble opinion. Has it happened to your website yet? I wanted to ask experts here, who can advice based on their website's numbers. Thanks!

[goodoldweb]

I use AI apps quite a lot throughout the day, but when it comes to shopping for products, I still rely on traditional search to compare and research. I just don’t trust the way these tools try to hand-feed recommendations — I’m skeptical about the freshness and accuracy of the information.

Too early to tell IMO, but i don't think search is going anywhere anytime soon. AI's often get it wrong.

[Martin Potter]

At least over the last 6 months, my own website (small, non-commercial, information-based) has suffered a significant loss of organic traffic, while there has been an almost equal increase in scraping activity, despite my efforts to block it. Having said that, I believe that my efforts have been successful in blocking many of the scrapers but then there are the ones without meaningful UAs, with random IP addresses, etc, etc that get through anyway. So the trend in loss of visitors using "real" search seems pretty clear to me.

Regarding the use of AI, I don't (as far as I know). And I stopped using Google search several years ago, in favour of DuckDuckGo. Recent stories in the technical press about AI's halucinatory behaviour and the production of invented "facts" just makes me more firm in my belief that current AI technology is to be avoided.

[Swanny007]

I am in the same boat, this year has seen nothing but organic traffic and revenue decrease and bot "attacks" increase. This sucks.

I am trying out Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT on an almost daily basis to figure it out from a user perspective, and at times it's incredibly useful.

[wanozoro]

Mostly true.
The thing is that earlier content writers were writing one first hand information on users most searched or brand new thought. As the AI started to grow, it has already fed with different kind of information that covers variety of niches. So it's natural that user transition into a platform where every answer is there.
If we want to even bypass AI for CTR then the only option is to focus on brand new content and adopt to new strategies.

[tangor]

The old web is dead. Search will still be in the mix, but USERS---always the odd factor, are easily led by bright shiny objects such as AI---are lazy, greedy, and needy. Quick answers without hard work makes them happy.

Meanwhile, the rest of us providing those answers have been sucked up by AI/LLM bots and homogenized into a generic answer with no source click through EVEN IF the generally mindless user even wanted to "learn more."

Human nature.

I am trying out Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT on an almost daily basis to figure it out from a user perspective, and at times it's incredibly useful.

And there in lies the rub. If "we" find it useful what does that say for the future?

Just sayin'!

[EditorialGuy]

ChatGPT shows up regularly in my traffic reports, but it's still behind conventional search (including Bing and DuckDuckGo). I rarely see Perplexity mentioned.

Our Google traffic is holding up better than I'd have expected, with a boost from the latest update. Some days we're ahead of last year, which is remarkable in the era of Google AI Overviews. The long-range outlook probably isn't great, though.

[RedBar]

I'm very much 50/50 with AI's accuracy, sometimes it's spot on, sometimes it's total pie-in-the-sky BS.

Two examples:

1. I have a globally exclusive naturallly-occurring specialist widget product. Searching AI all I see is a re-write of my information for 80% of its result and then 20% of completely fabricated nonsense. Plus for many of my trade's widgets AI only gets 50% correct if it's lucky.

2. On the other hand, my wife has an iPhone and only yesterday I had to sort-out some settings that had transferred from her old phone to the new one and were obviously conflicting. Within 30 mins it was all resolved and working perfectly thanks to the AI suggestions, I did not go to any other page!

For sure AI will get better as it "learns" and refines but, at the end of the day, for the correct information to be suggested means that the correct information firstly has to be created, uploaded and found / scraped.

Therefore, at the moment, what is your level of confidence in this?

As I said, I'm 50/50, and crucially remember many industries cannot afford to rely on 50/50, they need 100%.