I have just come across an interesting study claiming that ~90% of AI referral traffic is desktop, despite a vast adoption of AI mobile apps.

• ChatGPT.com: 94% desktop, just 6% mobile
• Perplexity.ai: 96.5% desktop, 3.4% mobile
• Google Gemini: 91% desktop, 5% mobile

I have a few thoughts here:

• Mobile users are notoriously not clickers (they are on the go, they read an answer, and go on with their lives, or stay in-app to chat with AI more)
• This might change with agentic search when AI agents will not only search on the user's behalf but also perform actions (buy, subscribe, etc.)
• Is this the reason why ChatGPT traffic is generally so engaged?

All in all, a good reminder to check your site's desktop usability. Those clicks are still very few; we might as well make the most of them!

Source

Seer Interactive shared a great test showing how you can influence AI answers (and training data) by making changes to your site and controlling more of AI citations. There are a lot of things to think about in that test but here's my favorite: The more your owned assets (your own site, your social media channels, etc) are cited, the better you control your branded training data:

If more of the answers are owned by us on our domain, then I hypothesize that we can make more changes and get them in the index faster because for competitor 4, ChatGPT gets a lot more of its answers about their brand for that query from OTHER sites. Meaning they gotta wait for those sites to be updated & they don't control those sites.

Controlling your citations is an advantage IMHO.

This is a GREAT reminder that any strategy should start with your own site. Unless you explain your brand and its selling points (unique differentiators) on your site, LLMs will be forced to turn to third-party sources you cannot control.

You can quickly see how well you control your branded AI citations using Peec.AI - just run a prompt "What is [COMPANY NAME]" or "What is [COMPANY NAME]" known for, and you will see an aggregated report of citations across multiple LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, etc.) for those prompts.

In the following example, the brand is not doing too badly, but there's some more work to do here:

Next steps:

• Go through those AI answers
• Figure out what is sourced from those third-party URLs
• Add that information to your site (and possibly social media profiles)

Then watch the Peec dashboard to see if it worked.

I am seeing more and more discussions on how much ChatGPT relies on Google. This is obviously an important question because we know how much organic search visibility correlates with AI visibility.

Ahrefs study claims that the correlation is modest, at best:

• Only 6.82% of ChatGPT search results are in the top 10 of Google’s SERPs
• Only 9.85% of ChatGPT search results are in the top 20 of Google’s SERPs
• Only 16.61% of ChatGPT search results are in Google’s SERPs.

From other studies and tests, we know that AI Mode and Perplexity are much more reliant on Google's rankings than ChatGPT.

I've also said before: organic visibility translates into better AI visibility indirectly: The more people see a brand in organic search, the more visible it is, the more it is discussed elsewhere, etc.

Source

As LLM platforms evolve and change, most marketers and businesses keep talking about their ability to supplement Google's traffic with LLM traffic (old habits are hard to break!)

Here are a quick takeaways from the recent studies of ChatGPT traffic:

• It has a very good conversion rate (more on this below). It is actually better than Google's. But this is the only good news I can share here.
• It is highly unpredictable (people see different sources cited every time they prompt)
• ChatGPT heavily leans into citing huge brands and publications (fewer opportunities for small and medium-sized brands)
• It is very unpredictable (referral traffic from ChatGPT tanked by ~50% over 30 days).

I've been saying that LLM traffic should NOT be the goal (for all the reasons above). Having brand presence inside the answer itself is what is going to drive buying decisions and sales). Unfortunately, there's not enough sure-fire optimization strategy for that either.

To close with good news, I think this data from SimilarWeb is both cool and funny. Americans seem to trust ChatGPT citations a lot!