AI search is a small slice of your traffic. New data says it is worth measuring now.

We read the original reports behind two new AI-search studies. They measure website visits and online orders, not phone calls, so they cannot say whether AI brings a local service business more or better leads. Here is what they show, what they leave out, and what you can measure this week.

What the two studies found

IDHL, a UK and US digital agency, published its State of AI Search 2026 report in September. It covers 1.5 million AI-search sessions from 175 Google Analytics 4 profiles, across 70 brands and 20 industries, between July 2025 and July 2026. IDHL reports AI-search sessions up 392%, transactions up 553% and revenue up 312%. In the same data, organic search grew 28%, paid search 19% and direct traffic 25%. AI search produced 21,141 transactions in total. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH

Shero, a Shopify agency, studied 73 online stores it manages, with 96.4 million sessions and 976,668 orders in 2026. AI assistants sent those stores about 896 visits a day in September 2025 and about 917 a year later. Orders from those visits rose from 5.9 a day to 16.1, about 2.7 times as many. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH

Adobe’s data on US retailers, covering over 1 trillion visits, points in the same direction. AI traffic to retailers rose 393% in the first quarter of 2026. In March 2026 it converted 42% better than other traffic, after converting 38% worse a year earlier. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH Those are Adobe’s figures as TechCrunch reported them on April 16, 2026.

ChatGPT was behind about 91% of the AI sessions in IDHL’s data and 88% of the AI visits in Shero’s. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH Similarweb measures visits to the AI sites themselves and shows a different picture: ChatGPT fell from about 76% to about 53% of generative AI website visits between June 2025 and May 2026, while Gemini rose to 27 to 28%. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH Referrals and usage measure different things. Other assistants may send fewer clicks per use, so referral reports can understate how many customers use them. DHM INTERPRETATION

Why the headline numbers look bigger than they are

AI still accounts for a small share of website visits. SE Ranking looked at Google Analytics data from 101,574 websites and found ChatGPT referrals were 0.32% of website traffic worldwide in May 2026, a record, up from 0.23% in April. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH Shero’s stores saw all AI assistants together bring 0.21% of sessions and 0.26% of orders in 2026. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH IDHL’s report also says AI-driven traffic remains a small share of total visits for most brands. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH

IDHL’s 392% figure needs context. The report labels it year on year, but also describes it as growth across 13 months, almost five-fold. Its figures for July 2026 alone are the stricter test: sessions were up 109% and transactions were up 190%. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH That is still fast growth, but it is not the same as 392%.

Some of the jump may reflect a change in how links are displayed, rather than more people asking questions. SE Ranking found ChatGPT’s referral share barely moved from January to April 2026, up 1.5% in total, then rose 36.7% in May alone. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH IDHL says its US and UK sessions also rose in May, and links part of that increase to more clickable links in ChatGPT results. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH Similarweb reports that ChatGPT began making brand names in its answers clickable around then. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH More visible links can produce more clicks even if the number of questions stays the same. DHM INTERPRETATION

AI orders may also be smaller. Shero’s median store saw AI orders 15% smaller than organic orders. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH IDHL’s totals suggest the same direction: revenue rose 312% while transactions rose 553%, implying the average transaction was worth roughly a third less. IDHL does not report this directly. This is our arithmetic, and it shows direction only. DHM INTERPRETATION

What the studies do not cover

AI search follows seasonal demand in some industries, but not others

IDHL found that AI search was starting to follow real-world demand. Its retail home-improvement rows ran well ahead of the year before and peaked in June, travel peaked in December and May, and property spiked in January and February. Legal barely moved all year, while professional services ran 1.8 times ahead of the year before. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH IDHL advises building AI visibility months ahead of a peak, using the content and recommendations that shape how a brand is understood. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH

The June peak for home and garden retail does not show that roofers peak in June. Those rows cover retail product categories. For a service business, the useful takeaway is to check, before your own busy season, that the pages, hours, prices and service areas an assistant could read are current. DHM INTERPRETATION

How local answers differ

Google says its AI features can include information about local businesses, and that using a Business Profile can help a business appear in AI responses and in other results. GOOGLE DOCUMENTED Our explainer on how AI Overviews choose businesses goes deeper.

SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index covered more than 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands. ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of those locations, while an average 35.9% appeared in Google’s local 3-pack. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH SOCi reads that as AI being far more selective than the Map Pack, but these are different measures, so treat the comparison as context rather than a like-for-like test. The study covers chains and franchises, not single-location service businesses, and SOCi sells software for multi-location brands. Our guide to how ChatGPT finds local businesses explains what it reads.

The signals also differ. In Whitespark’s 2026 survey of 47 local SEO experts, Business Profile signals carried 32% of the estimated weight for the Local Pack and Maps, reviews 20% and on-page signals 15%. For visibility in AI answers the same experts gave on-page signals 24%, reviews 16%, citations 13%, links 13% and Business Profile signals 12%. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH These are expert estimates, not Google figures. They suggest that for AI answers, the words on your website and what other sites say about you may matter more than your profile alone. DHM INTERPRETATION

Local customers may also skip your website. They can tap Call or Directions in Maps, or phone after reading an answer. IDHL and Shero count website sessions and purchases, but neither counts phone calls. DHM INTERPRETATION

What we see on our own site (October 20, 2026)

At 137 sessions, our own data cannot tell us whether AI sends us customers. It does show the measurement problem. The largest bucket, Direct, combines people typing our address, people tapping links in apps, our own visits and other visits with no referrer. The window we read on October 16 showed 86 sessions, 54 of them Direct. Both windows are short, and GA4 cannot split Direct any further. DHM DATA

Do this week

1. Check for the AI Assistant channel. In Google Analytics 4, open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and set the primary dimension to Session default channel group. Since May 13, 2026, GA4 has had a default AI Assistant channel for visits from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Grok. It excludes Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, which stay in Organic Search. GOOGLE DOCUMENTED If there is no AI Assistant row, GA4 did not label any visits that way in the selected period. That does not mean no customer used AI.
2. Open the Generative AI report in Search Console. It shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode: impressions, pages, countries and devices, but not clicks. Google says it reached all sites worldwide on August 31, 2026, and it may not appear if your site has too few impressions in those features. GOOGLE DOCUMENTED
3. Link your Business Profile to Google Analytics. In GA4, go to Admin, then Product links, then Google Business Profile links. You need Editor or Administrator on the property and Owner or Manager on the profile. It adds calls, directions, website clicks, messages and bookings for the last six months, as totals. GOOGLE DOCUMENTED It shows what people did, not where they came from, so keep asking.
4. Ask every lead how they found you. Add “AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini or similar)” alongside Google search, Google Maps, referral and social on every form and call script. Record the answer. This can capture customers who never click. Our Sauce deep-dive turns your answers into a quick gap check, and last week’s guide covers the other layers.
5. Allow ChatGPT’s search crawler. OpenAI’s documentation says a site that opts out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link. Check your robots.txt. Blocking GPTBot, the training crawler, is a separate decision.
6. Make your homepage and top service pages answer customers’ questions. Similarweb found about 62 to 63% of ChatGPT referrals landing on homepages by late May, and SE Ranking found 60% of AI-referred traffic landing there. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH State in plain text what you do, where you work, what a job costs or what affects the price, your hours, and one obvious way to call or book. Keep the Business Profile consistent with that information. Our local landing page guide shows how to build those pages. DHM INTERPRETATION
7. Do not mass-produce pages. Google says creating separate content for every variation of a query, mainly to influence rankings or AI responses, violates its scaled content abuse policy. GOOGLE DOCUMENTED Answer the questions customers really ask on pages worth reading.

If you want the facts every platform reads about your business checked, the free scan does it before any payment. No one can guarantee a mention in an AI answer, and we do not.