I'm hearing a few people talking about my presentation at B2B Forum, specifically related to traffic levels I was showing coming from ChatGPT to my site... so let me show you how to find if AI search is sending you traffic and if so, how much.
Like many marketers, I spend all day in Hubspot, Google Analytics is more robust, but it is quite hard to use, so I am going to show you how to find your AI traffic in Hubspot.
First, expect traffic to go down because back in the day you would do 10 searches and click on 5 sites per search, that meant you might visit 50 web pages to become a customer of 1 of them.
In an AI world, I don't need to do 10 searches and visit 50 web pages on my "how to find the right CRM" journey anymore, I can put in my needs in ChatGPT or Perplexity and have a conversation and at then end get 3 companies that meet my needs, which might only be 3 navigational searches, and 3 clicks, vs 10 searches and 50 clicks.
Click on Referrals in Hubspot:
Get to the screen that shows you all the sites referring traffic to your website, look for the AI sites, click on them and you'll get trend lines.
When tracking ChatGPT traffic to your website you have to remember that OpenAI used to be the referring source, now it is ChatGPT, and maybe if Sam changes it to chat.com we'll have to update it again.
Here is what openai.com as a referral looks like, notice the fall off - don't assume you stopped getting traffic from ChatGPT its just that the referral changed.
When the change occurred you'll see traffic looking like this:
See how in October we had 200 visits from chatgpt.com, but in January we had 14.
I would also recommend that you do not look at this monthly, but look at it weekly at a minimum, because all these platforms are changing things that impact how much traffic you will get from them. Like ChatGPT just launched ChatGPT search for paying customers so the day that launched or the week that launched I would be looking at the impact to me / my business.
You can do the same for Perplexity and Gemini - and track their trajectories as well. You can see Gemini was late to the game to include referrals, but we got them for now, starting in June.
These are super simple ways to track your AI traffic in Hubspot or whatever tool you are using.
What do I do if my traffic numbers from ChatGPT and other AI search is non existent or very small?
If traffic is non existent, check to see if you are blocking the AI bots.
If traffic from ChatGPT is low, then maybe your customers are not there. You can ignore (for now) some of the hype.
Before you do that, check Sparktoro.com - to understand the propensity of people who visit your website to also visit ChatGPT and any other site.
How I would read this result from Sparktoro:
On average the US based audience affinity of NYtimes is 45/100. For people who visit seerinteractive.com, it is 100/100. So there is a strong affinity for the NYtimes for people who visit Seer Interactive, and that affinity is much stronger than the general population. I consistently get confused with sparktoro data, so please correct me if I am reading this wrong, as this is a different metric ranking than they were using before.
What I like about this metric is that it gives you a double check on the slope or lack of slope on the visitors coming from these sites.
Keep in mind that there's going to be lower traffic across the board in an AI world, so comparing ChatGPT traffic to Google is inadvisable.
Not every visit is a valuable one
It's not enough to know traffic is coming from ChatGPT and other AI search engines, someone searching for an "agency" is very different than someone searching for "how to find a sitemap". Both are a "visit" - so how do you solve for this problem?
Now we gotta go into Google Analytics or whatever tool we use and look at a page level report with the source being ChatGPT.
In this report I would read it the following way based on typical site sections...
ChatGPT is driving most of the traffic to my homepage, what might that mean?
Homepage traffic from ChatGPT - People hitting my homepage from a search, are likely one of three groups, salespeople researching our company, job seekers, or prospects. The only traffic my homepage should get is people looking for an agency.
Blog traffic from ChatGPT - Anyone searching on AI search that gets to a blog page likely had a problem and we were a resource that showed and got clicks, given the depth of content on our blog I can't assume much about the people who get to pages.
Services pages & case study traffic from ChatGPT - while the traffic is lowest on this content, we are getting traffic to those pages and I got to make a call on what I think that traffic is likely looking for, so lets make it. Its likely prospects, I can't imagine a question where those pages would have been a good answer unless you are looking for something related to getting services to solve a problem.
