Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
ChatGPT traffic has been steadily rising since its release in November 2022. Ahrefs, a comprehensive digital marketing and SEO platform, has recently done a study comparing monthly referral traffic to websites from Google Search compared to ChatGPT.
What the numbers say
The first three months of data have been released, covering 44,421 sites and unsurprisingly, Google is still dominating referral traffic currently with 41.9% of total web traffic compared to 0.19% of ChatGPTs. However, ChatGPT referral traffic is currently growing at a much faster rate than Google, with Google growing 1.4% Month over month and ChatGPT growing 5.3%.
While 0.19% may look insignificant at the moment, if ChatGPT keeps up its current growth rate, then this will see it change rapidly. It’s also worth remembering that 8.5 billion searches are made daily on Google, which means 0.19% of the market share still represents millions of potential customers users could be missing out on by not optimising for AI traffic.
What should Marketers do?
With these statistics in mind, there are a number of steps marketers can take to future-proof their sites and ensure consistent traffic growth:
- Continue to optimise for SEO on Google, making sure you are consistently optimising your content and site to stay in Google’s rankings and in front of the majority of your traffic.
- Track traffic sources on your own sites. Referral traffic on your own site might be slightly different from the statistics reported by Ahrefs. Some sites may do better on AI than others. Make sure to track your referral traffic so you know where your site visits are coming from and optimise accordingly.
- Optimise for AIO and ChatGPT. Make sure to optimise for and use AI-friendly content, such as using informative, concise content on your site, to appear more in AI models.
What does this mean for Marketers?
When analysing the numbers, it’s clear that for the time being, Google is still the most important platform for visibility and reaching the largest potential audience. However, ChatGPT can still be regarded in its infancy and will grow significantly in the years to come, meaning that marketers to ignore ChatGPT would be missing out on a new, growing customer base. Optimising for both, while prioritising Google, is currently the most sensible strategy going forward.
