AI Search. Does it Matter? Right now (early 2026) AI isn’t sending a lot of traffic to your website, almost none. But there’s no doubt AI is only going to get bigger.
AI Search. Does it Matter?
Projected AI Search for the Next Two Years
- Current (2026): AI sends <1% of traffic but grows 527% YoY; visitors convert 4.4x higher than conventional ones due to intent.
- Projected 2028: AI traffic could reach 10-20% of total web visits (a 10-20x increase), with platforms like ChatGPT potentially surpassing Google’s volume in some metrics, according to semrush.com.
For e-commerce, AI might drive 22-30% more targeted traffic, offsetting conventional drops.
AI Search. Does it Matter?
Right now, in early 2026, AI isn’t sending a lot of traffic to most websites — almost none, in fact. So is it really worth worrying about? The honest answer is yes. Here’s why.
The Question Every Business Owner Is Asking
It’s a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than the kind of breathless hype that tends to surround anything with the word “AI” attached to it.
Because the numbers, right now, are unimpressive. If you look at your Google Analytics or Search Console data today, the proportion of your traffic that is arriving via ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or any other AI platform is probably somewhere between negligible and zero. For the vast majority of small and medium-sized business websites, AI-referred traffic in early 2026 is less than one percent of total visits. In many cases it’s unmeasurable entirely.
So — does it matter?
Yes. Emphatically yes. And the reason why comes down to the difference between where things are right now and where they are going — and how quickly they are getting there.
The Numbers That Matter
Here is the current picture, stated plainly.
AI-referred web traffic is growing at approximately 527% year on year. That is not a typo. It is a number that puts AI search in the same category as mobile internet in 2010 or social media in 2008 — a technology that starts from a small base but compounds at a rate that makes the starting point almost irrelevant within a few years.
Projections from industry analysts, including data cited by Semrush, suggest that by 2028 AI platforms could be responsible for somewhere between 10% and 20% of total web visits globally. That represents a ten to twenty times increase from the current position — and it may prove conservative if the pace of adoption among everyday users continues to accelerate as it has over the past eighteen months.
For e-commerce specifically, the projections are even more striking. AI-driven traffic is estimated to potentially drive 22–30% more targeted visitors to online retailers within the same timeframe, partially offsetting the losses that many e-commerce sites are already experiencing from reduced traditional organic search visibility.
But here is perhaps the most commercially significant number of all: visitors who arrive at a website via an AI recommendation currently convert at approximately 4.4 times the rate of visitors arriving via conventional search. Read that again — 4.4 times. These are not casual browsers who clicked a blue link out of mild curiosity. These are people who asked an AI a specific question, received a specific recommendation, and acted on it with a level of intent and confidence that traditional search rarely produces.
The volume is small today. The quality and the trajectory are both extraordinary.
Why the Small Numbers Now Don’t Tell the Whole Story
One of the reasons the current traffic figures are misleading as a guide to urgency is that AI’s influence on consumer behaviour is already significantly larger than the direct referral numbers suggest.
Consider what actually happens when someone uses an AI to research a purchase, a holiday, a service provider, or a local business. In many cases they don’t click through to a website at all — the AI has already given them the answer, the recommendation, or the reassurance they needed. The decision has been influenced, or in some cases made entirely, without a single website visit being recorded in anyone’s analytics.
This is the zero-click problem, and it cuts in two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, it means that AI is already shaping purchasing decisions for businesses that have no idea it’s happening, because there’s no traffic data to look at. On the other hand, it means that the businesses being recommended in those AI responses are gaining influence and credibility that doesn’t show up as a website visit but absolutely shows up as a customer through the door, a booking made, or a phone call received.
The question “is AI sending traffic to my website?” is therefore only half the question. The full question is: “when someone asks an AI about my type of business, my location, or my service, is my business the one being mentioned?” That is happening right now, invisibly, for businesses across every sector — and the businesses that have invested in their AI visibility are the ones being named.
The Mobile Parallel — And Why It Matters
The most useful historical parallel for understanding the AI search moment is the mobile revolution of roughly 2010 to 2015.
In 2010, mobile internet usage was a small fraction of total web traffic. Many business owners looked at their own analytics, saw that only 5% or 8% of their visitors were on mobile devices, and concluded that mobile optimisation was not a priority. By 2015, mobile had overtaken desktop as the primary way people accessed the internet — and the businesses that had ignored mobile were scrambling to catch up, often at significant cost, having lost ground to competitors who had adapted early.
The pattern with AI search is structurally identical. The numbers today are small. The trajectory is steep and accelerating. The cost of adapting early is relatively modest. The cost of ignoring it and catching up later is considerably higher — both in practical terms and in terms of the competitive ground ceded in the meantime.
There is one important difference from the mobile parallel that actually makes the AI case more urgent, not less. Mobile optimisation was largely a technical task — you rebuilt or redesigned your site to render properly on small screens, and the job was largely done. AI optimisation is fundamentally a content task. It requires rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking how your website communicates — and that takes time. You cannot do it overnight when the numbers start to become impossible to ignore. The businesses building their AI visibility now are accumulating an advantage that will compound over the next two to three years in exactly the way that early mobile adopters did in the early 2010s.
What Is Already Changing — Right Now
It would be a mistake to think of AI search as purely a future concern. Several things are already changing in ways that have direct, measurable consequences for websites and business owners today.
Google’s AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries that now appear at the top of millions of search results pages — are already reducing the number of users who scroll down to the traditional organic results and click through to websites. Studies tracking this shift suggest that click-through rates from Google have fallen significantly in categories where AI Overviews are frequently triggered, with some sectors seeing drops of 25–55% in organic traffic over the past eighteen months.
This is not speculative future impact — it is happening now, to real businesses, across real search categories. If you are in hospitality, professional services, home services, healthcare, education, or retail — categories where consumers regularly ask information-based questions before making a purchase decision — there is a high probability that AI Overviews are already reducing the number of Google visitors who reach your site.
The businesses that are appearing within those AI Overviews — the ones whose content is being pulled in and summarised at the top of the page — are maintaining their visibility despite the shift. The ones that are not are watching their traffic decline without an obvious explanation in their keyword rankings.
Does It Matter for Your Business Specifically?
The honest answer is that it depends somewhat on your sector and your customer — but for most businesses, the answer is yes.
If your customers are likely to ask an AI a question before deciding to contact you, visit you, or buy from you, then AI search visibility matters to your business. That covers a very wide range of sectors: hotels and restaurants where people research before booking; solicitors and accountants where people seek guidance before engaging; retailers where people compare products and options before purchasing; tradespeople and home service providers where people assess credibility before calling; healthcare providers where people seek information before booking appointments.
The businesses for whom AI search matters least are those operating in highly local, relationship-driven markets where customers come almost entirely through personal recommendation and repeat business — and even those businesses are not immune, because AI is increasingly being used to validate recommendations that arrive through word of mouth. “My friend recommended this accountant — let me ask ChatGPT if they’re well-regarded” is a use case that is already happening.
So What Should You Do?
The good news is that the foundations of good AI visibility are the same as the foundations of good website practice generally: clear content, specific information, a well-structured site, a consistent presence across the web, and regular updates. You are not being asked to throw away what you have built and start again.
What you are being asked to do is look at your website through a different lens — to ask not just “will Google rank this?” but “will an AI understand this, trust this, and recommend this?” — and to make the adjustments that bring your content up to the standard that AI systems reward.
That is exactly what FreeAssortment.net helps businesses do. An AI Search audit is the fastest way to understand where your website currently stands and what the priority actions are — and it gives you a clear, actionable roadmap rather than a general anxiety about a changing landscape.
Get in touch at office@freeassortment.net or call (+353) 89 488 5089 to find out more. The best time to start was a year ago. The second best time is now.
FreeAssortment.net | Web Development & Digital Marketing | Kenmare, Kerry & Mijas Costa, Spain
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