Three studies published in the past week looked at how many website visitors and sales ChatGPT and other AI assistants actually send, and all three came back with small numbers. On October 22, 2026, Search Engine Roundtable gathered them under the headline “3 New Studies Suggest AI Visibility & Search Not Worth Investing In.” If you run a plumbing company, a dental practice or a law firm and someone has been pitching you on “AI search,” these numbers are worth reading before you spend anything.
What the research found
1. Marie Haynes, “GEO is a distraction” (October 21, 2026). Haynes looked at 12 months of Google Analytics 4 data from 100 websites “of varying sizes,” covering “over 145 million sessions.”
- Haynes writes that “sessions from ChatGPT amounted to just 0.62% of the volume driven by Google Organic.” With every other AI assistant added in, the figure rose to 0.73%.
- ChatGPT visitors converted at 13.8%, against 3.02% for Google organic visitors.
- Even so, “Google still drove 96.5% of the total conversions across all channels analyzed,” and “Google organic drove 27x more conversions than all LLMs combined.”
- 45 of the 100 sites were not tracking any key events at all.
Her conclusion: “The AI search that is actually sending people to businesses today isn’t ChatGPT. It’s Google.”
2. The SEO Works, AI referral traffic benchmark. The UK agency studied 95 websites in GA4 from September 2025 to August 2026, and used 63 of them for its conversion comparisons.
- “Organic search delivered 39 times more traffic than AI assistants.”
- “For every 100 conversions organic search delivered, AI referrals delivered 3.2.”
- AI visitors converted at 7.18% against 6.08% for organic. On 23 of the 63 sites, AI visitors converted worse.
- Sites where AI traffic grew also tended to grow in organic search. The study reports a correlation of +0.557.
3. Kevin Indig, “Does AI drive more direct traffic?” (October 19, 2026). Indig tested a common claim: people see a brand in an AI answer and later type its name into Google or straight into the browser. Across 12 sites and four brands, he wrote: “I couldn’t establish a reliable link between AI visibility and subsequent branded search or Direct traffic.” He added: “An effect could still exist. I just couldn’t isolate it.”
What it means for a local service business
None of the three studies looked at local businesses specifically. Indig says his sample skews B2B, and The SEO Works groups its sites as B2C, B2B and mixed, not by trade. So these are general numbers, not plumber numbers. Still, several conclusions hold up for a local business.
Google is still where your customers come from
The studies agree on this. If your Google Business Profile has the wrong hours, your website does not list the services you sell, or your reviews have stalled, fix those first. Nothing in this research supports moving money away from Google to chase ChatGPT.
Some “AI search” is already inside Google
The SEO Works points out that clicks from Google’s AI Overviews arrive as ordinary organic sessions and cannot be separated in GA4, so its AI figure “should be read as a floor.” When someone asks Google a question and clicks your link in the AI Overview, your analytics count that as Google. The AI answer that matters most to a local business may be Google’s own.
Make sure you can measure a lead at all
Haynes found that 45 of her 100 sites were not tracking any key events. A local service business is unlikely to do better. Most of your leads are phone calls and form submissions, and if GA4 does not record those as key events, you cannot compare any channel against another. Check that clicks on your phone number and quote form submissions are set up as key events. Then ask new customers how they found you and write the answer down. Indig recommends combining where your brand appears, how people discovered you and what happens commercially, because analytics alone could not show the effect.
Treat AI answers as a check, not a traffic channel
A customer who asks ChatGPT for a good emergency plumber may never click to your website. They may just call the name they were given. These studies count website sessions, so they would not capture that, and Indig could not detect it in branded search either. That does not prove it is happening, and it does not prove it is not.
The useful question is narrower than “how much traffic does AI send.” It is whether AI assistants describe your business correctly when someone asks about your trade in your town, or name a competitor instead. You can check that with a fixed set of buyer questions re-run every month. If the answers are wrong or leave you out, the fix is usually the same work Google rewards: clear service pages, accurate listings, and reviews that say what you did.
What did not change
ChatGPT traffic is small but real. In Haynes’ data its visitors converted at more than four times the rate of Google organic visitors, and The SEO Works also found AI visitors converted slightly better overall. Small and worthless are different things.
The measurement gaps are still there. GA4 cannot separate AI Overview clicks from organic clicks, and none of these studies can see a customer who hears your name from an assistant and picks up the phone.
No AI engine can be bought or guaranteed. These studies give a business one more reason to distrust anyone selling “AI rankings” as a replacement for the basics.
The short version
Three studies this month found that Google organic search sends far more visits and conversions than ChatGPT and other AI assistants. For a local service business, that means getting Google right first, tracking calls and forms so you can measure anything at all, and checking what AI assistants say about you, without paying for promised AI traffic.