Visitors From AI Assistants Engage More Than a Website’s Other Visitors
On small business websites getting regular traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI assistants, 64% of AI visitors engaged with the site, versus 50% of everyone else. AI visitors were at least as engaged on 82% of those sites.
AI assistants send most small businesses only a trickle of visitors today, but those visitors tend to stay longer and look at more pages than the rest of your traffic. Being the site an AI tool chooses to link to is worth more than the raw visit count suggests.
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot now send some people to business websites, usually after answering a question and linking to a source. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of making your site easy for these tools to understand and quote.
The volume is still small for most businesses. The more useful question is whether those visitors are any good.
What the data shows
Diib looked at 249 small business websites connected to Diib through Google Analytics that got at least 10 visits from AI assistants in the 30 days ending October 19, 2026. On each site, we compared AI visitors with all of that site’s other visitors. Google Analytics counts a visit as engaged when someone stays at least 10 seconds, views a second page or takes a key action.
- Engagement rate: a median of 64% for AI visitors, versus 50% for other visitors.
- Share of sites where AI visitors engaged at least as well: 82%.
- Average visit: about 2 minutes 39 seconds, versus 2 minutes 2 seconds.
- Pages per visit: 2.6, versus 2.1.
Fewer than a third of the websites Diib could track AI traffic on over this period reached even 10 AI visits a month, which is why this is a cross-industry figure rather than a per-industry one.
What this does and doesn’t tell you
This is aggregated Diib data, and the sites with regular AI traffic may differ from typical sites in ways that also affect engagement. It also can’t show whether AI visitors went on to call or buy. A likely reason for the gap is that someone arriving from an AI answer has already had a question narrowed down, and clicks through to check details or take the next step.
For most small businesses, AI traffic is a small share of visits today. But the visitors it does send tend to be some of the most engaged ones.