AI search to SEO comparisons are fundamentally flawed.
The near only time AI models consistently surface a specific brand is when someone is actively evaluating solutions. That’s bottom-of-funnel by nature…so of course that traffic converts higher. This is not groundbreaking news.
It’s not that the data is wrong or one channel is better or AI is winning and Google is failing. It’s not a doomsday signal. It’s simply that we’re comparing bottom-of-funnel AI referrals against the entirety of non-branded Google traffic. Those aren’t the same thing whatsoever.
When you peel back the layers, their blog went from ~450K organic visits/month to under 150K in about 18 months. And 66% of their remaining organic site-wide traffic is branded search according to Ahrefs.
The non-brand SEO bucket they’re measuring that 14% against would include the most top-of-funnel informational content imaginable. Queries with no buying intent whatsoever.
Them getting hammered by Google on the blog is a pretty good sign of that, too: lots of content they probably did not need to publish or try to rank for.
A fairer comparison would be AI-referred conversions vs. your highest-converting bottom-of-funnel comparison and alternative pages from organic search. That would tell us something real about intent by platform.
The core point is that intent is everything. No longer are the days of spray and pray mass publishing to capture 10m organic visits that don’t convert.
Your SEO and thus AI search program don’t mean sh** if it is not driving revenue.
