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The Traffic Pool Is Shrinking, And Which Channel Fills It Matters Less Than We Think via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester

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The Traffic Pool Is Shrinking, And Which Channel Fills It Matters Less Than We Think via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester

AI referrals versus Google is a fair comparison of two streams feeding a smaller pool, and agents that complete the purchase are where the offset starts.

Late last month the industry spent a week debating a ratio, and seems to skip the number it sits on.

Three pieces of research landed within days of each other and carried an entire conversation. Marie Haynes looked at 12 months of GA4 data across 100 sites and more than 145 million sessions, and found that ChatGPT sent 0.62% of the sessions Google organic did, rising to 0.73% with every LLM included. The SEO Works benchmarked 95 sites and found organic search delivered 39 times the traffic of AI assistants. Kevin Indig ran 632 tests across 12 sites looking for AI visibility to show up later as branded search or direct traffic, and couldn’t find a reliable relationship. All three are careful pieces of work, generous with their data and candid about their limits, and I’d trust the numbers in each.

The conclusion the wider industry drew from them traveled faster than the work itself: AI sends almost nothing, so GEO is a distraction, so get back to Google. That reading answers a reasonable question: Which channel sends more visitors today, and the answer is plainly Google. What it leaves out is the size of the pool both channels draw from, and that pool is getting smaller.

Kevin, as it happens, published the clearest evidence of that a few days later. S. S. over the same two years.


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