An analytics firm tracked 2,000 retail sites and found both things are true at once: visits originating from AI assistants roughly doubled, and those visitors buy at about half the rate organic search visitors do.

I keep seeing people celebrate the first number without mentioning the second.

My read on why, though I’m not certain: when someone arrives from organic search they’ve already done the comparison work themselves. They clicked your link because they decided it was worth clicking. When someone arrives from an AI assistant, the assistant did the filtering and the person is often still in the browsing phase. Different intent at the moment of arrival.

If that’s right, treating AI referral traffic as equivalent to organic in your reporting is going to give you a distorted picture of what’s working.

Anyone running ecommerce and actually seeing this split in their own numbers? Curious whether the gap holds outside the aggregate.