Ahrefs Launches Tracker Comparing ChatGPT & Google Referral Traffic

Ahrefs has introduced a new public dashboard that shows how much traffic websites get from Google Search compared to ChatGPT. This tracker will update every month.

What the Dashboard Shows

The first set of data includes three complete months of traffic information from 44,421 websites using Ahrefs’ free Web Analytics tool.

In July, Google provided 41.9% of the total traffic, while ChatGPT accounted for only 0.19%. Interestingly, Google’s traffic grew by 1.4% from the previous month, while ChatGPT’s traffic grew by a larger 5.3%.

Earlier, in the previous month, Google had a growth of 6.8% and ChatGPT only grew by 1.6%. This means the growth rates can change from month to month, but Google still has a much larger share of total web traffic.

A notable quote from the dashboard states that “ChatGPT is growing 3.8 times faster than Google.” This indicates that AI-powered search tools are evolving quickly. In fact, ChatGPT is now a new source of traffic for websites, which wasn’t the case two years ago.

How the Data is Collected

To provide reliable results, the tracker only includes websites that have data for all the months being analyzed. This way, their growth metrics are strong and statistically significant.

The dashboard also notes the time of the last update and will continue to provide monthly updates going forward.

Some Important Notes

The dashboard only measures referral traffic that comes with a referrer. Many AI tools and in-app browsers don’t always send this information, which means they might sometimes miss tracking visits from AI sources.

Ahrefs has pointed out these gaps in tracking AI traffic in their previous analyses. It’s essential to be aware of this when comparing traffic from AI searches to traditional searches.

Also, it’s important to remember that this data is limited to websites using Ahrefs Web Analytics. Past research from Ahrefs indicated that AI referrals usually make up about 0.17% of a site’s traffic, which is similar to the current figure of 0.19%.

What’s Next?

While Google continues to dominate traffic numbers in this data, the growth of ChatGPT suggests that it could become a significant traffic source in the future.

You can use the tracker to monitor how traffic from both Google and ChatGPT changes over time, which can help you adapt your strategies accordingly.

Stay tuned and use this tool to see how these trends evolve!