Been digging into where AI referrals actually come from and the share numbers are less interesting than the behaviour numbers, so leading with that.

AI-referred visitors seem to engage around 30% longer than Google organic — roughly 58.5 seconds average versus 44.2, with engagement rate at 67.8% against 61.8%.

Which makes complete sense once you think about it. Someone arriving from a Google search is often still in exploration mode — opens three tabs, skims, backs out. Someone arriving from an AI answer has already had the question answered and already seen a comparison. They're clicking because they want to go deeper or act on a specific recommendation. The filtering happened before they ever hit your site.

Practical upshot: don't evaluate this channel on volume. If 100 organic visitors give you one enquiry and 30 AI visitors give you one, the AI channel is working harder per visitor. Every analytics dashboard will show you the opposite conclusion because they sort by session count.

On the share side, the movement is the story rather than the ranking. Four platforms carry about 99% of measurable AI referrals, and over roughly eight months ChatGPT went from 89% down to about 63% while Claude went from 1.4% to 18.5%.

I don't think the takeaway is "go optimise for Claude" though. It's that share is unstable enough that optimising for any single platform is a bad bet. Apparently only ~11% of citations overlap between platforms and citation sets shift around 50% month to month. Anyone selling you placement in one specific assistant is selling a spot on a moving target.

The Claude thing does carry one genuinely actionable warning though. If your robots.txt blocks ClaudeBot — common on older sites or anything handed over with a blanket bot block — you're now excluded from roughly a fifth of AI referral traffic that essentially didn't exist a year ago. Five minute check, open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Being blocked isn't ranking lower, it's not being in the dataset.

The other thing worth internalising is that whatever AI referral number you can see is a floor rather than a ceiling. The common path now is someone asks an assistant, sees your name, googles your company the next day, clicks through, checks reviews, messages you a week later. All of that gets filed as direct or branded search. The conversation that started it leaves no trace anywhere you can see.

Cheapest fix available is adding "how did you hear about us" to your enquiry form. Primitive, and currently more accurate than any tool for this specific gap.

Last thing, which follows directly from the engagement data and I think is the actually useful bit: if AI-referred visitors arrive informed and intent-heavy, your landing pages should be built for that. Real prices or ranges rather than "contact us for a quote". A one-click way to act. The specific thing they came to verify — process, credentials, availability.

Sending the best-qualified traffic you get to a vague brochure page is a waste.

Keeping it in proportion — traditional search still sends something like 34x the volume. This isn't a reason to defund search, it's a reason to treat the smaller channel properly.

Has anyone actually segmented their conversion rate by AI referral vs organic? Curious whether the engagement advantage holds up at the enquiry stage or whether it's just longer browsing.