I hesitated writing this post… it is the proverbial, “If you knew that gold was falling from the sky, would you go out and tell your neighbours?” 💰
This was this kind of dilemma.
The chart below shows our daily growth in referral traffic from ChatGPT to our top 20 brands, well technically it is all AI models excluding Google AIO, but really it is >95% ChatGPT referrals.
I have removed the y axis to protect some of our data.
Let’s just say that, the traffic is early stage, but now making a material difference on a monthly basis.
AI referrals are growing at a WoW growth rate at just under 15%. By the end of the summer, it could be 7x over current numbers as things stand. And even looking at today’s data I wonder if it is growing at a faster rate than that, though I pass off some of the surge as seasonality on search and discovery that starts to accelerate around now.
But what is fascinating to me is the performance of this traffic. It is far outperforming what we see across other mediums with the exception of brand-based searches.
That is ~3x vs. organic traffic arriving from Google or Bing. It is outperforming paid traffic by ~1.6x. Unreal. And yes, there is enough data here to be material and the value and pattern of performance has held true across large and small brands alike.
The question is why?
Sam Altman’s podcast yesterday was talking about how people are trusting ChatGPT more than he expected.
Is trust driving value?
Are people further down the marketing funnel after a lot of back and forth discussion with ChatGPT, thus when they get to us (then onto our partners), they are ready to buy?
The landing page experience is that which closely mirrors organic or paid traffic behaviour, in that it is landing on relevant concepts to the search intent (or conversation intent). There is a slightly elevated cart value, but that is mostly due to large NA presence. Conversion rate is definitely ‘up’ across this cohort.
I have so many questions.
Which is why I am posting this chart and data for others to comment on.
For those who have enough data and are now tracking AI referral traffic, are you seeing the same? Is your average transaction value higher than anticipated? Are your conversion rates of this referral traffic up and to the right? 📈
PS… I am not going to comment on the activities that are driving ChatGPT referrals in the first place. I will leave that to other prognosticators (like Brennen Bliss). As I like to say, “The success of today is driven from work that was done 6-12 months ago. The work of today will drive our success next year.”
