A SimilarWeb study found visitors arriving from AI recommendations viewed 12 pages and stayed 11.8 minutes, against 6.5 pages and 5.6 minutes for everyone else. The volume is small but the quality is high. Here is how to show up in the answer.
AI-referred visitors viewed nearly twice the pages and stayed twice as long. The recommendation did the pre-selling for you.
A new SimilarWeb study has put numbers on something marketers have suspected for a year: traffic that arrives from an AI recommendation behaves better than traffic that does not.
Visitors who landed on a brand site after an AI tool pointed them there viewed 12 pages and spent 11.8 minutes on the site. Visitors from other sources viewed 6.5 pages and spent 5.6 minutes. That is roughly double the depth and double the time, from people who were sent by a machine that had already vetted the option.
The logic holds. By the time someone clicks through from ChatGPT, the tool has already answered their question and named you as part of the answer. They arrive warmer, more informed and closer to a decision.
Why it matters
The volume of AI-referred traffic is still small for most Australian businesses, but the quality is high and the trend is only going one way. If a slice of your most engaged visitors is now coming from tools you cannot see into, you need to know whether you show up in those answers at all.
AI-influenced visitors spent 11.8 minutes on site versus 5.6 minutes for everyone else, more than double the engagement per visit.
This is the commercial case for taking AI visibility seriously. Not because it is fashionable, but because the people it sends convert.
What to do about it
The traffic is small and getting better. Show up in the answer and the machine does your warming for you.