Business Services Websites Are Ahead on ChatGPT Referrals
5.1% of business services websites in Diib's data had an AI assistant, almost always ChatGPT, among their top sources of referral traffic, versus 3.4% of websites in other industries.
AI assistants are starting to send real visitors to business services websites, and ChatGPT is by far the biggest source. It's still a small channel, but it's showing up more often for firms that sell expertise, where people ask AI for recommendations before they search.
AI assistants like ChatGPT don’t just answer questions. When they recommend a business or cite a source, some people click through. That shows up in Google Analytics as referral traffic from sites like chatgpt.com. For most small businesses, it’s still a trickle. For business services firms, it’s arriving a little sooner.
What the data shows
Diib looked at the top referral sources reported by Google Analytics between August 1 and September 30, 2026. It included websites whose top referral sources sent at least 100 visits:
- 5.1% of business services websites (21 of 414) had an AI assistant among their top referral sources. That compares with 3.4% of about 11,800 websites in other industries.
- ChatGPT accounted for nearly all of it. 20 of those 21 business services sites got their AI referrals from ChatGPT.
- Across all industries, other assistants such as Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Gemini showed up far less often than ChatGPT.
What this does and doesn’t tell you
This is aggregated Diib data from websites with connected analytics, and the numbers are small. It only counts AI assistants that ranked among a site’s top referral sources, so smaller amounts of AI traffic are missed. It also can’t show what people asked the assistant before they clicked.
The likely reason business services lead is the kind of questions people ask AI. “Who’s a good bookkeeper for a small restaurant?” and “What should I look for in a staffing agency?” are the research-style questions assistants are built to answer. That makes firms that sell expertise some of the first to see AI assistants send real visitors.