The problem
Planning kept asking two questions with no numbers behind them: how much traffic and revenue AI assistants send, and how much organic search traffic Google's AI Overviews take. The site's channel rules filed ChatGPT visits under Organic, so assistant traffic did not exist as a channel. AI Overview losses sat inside a general organic decline.
The build
- Identify AI visits on the landing page. ChatGPT strips the referrer and appends a UTM source, so referrer-only matching misses about 83% of ChatGPT visits. The rule is UTM source or an exact referrer-host match on the first pageview: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Brave Search, Kagi, and seven smaller engines.
- Stitch orders in any channel within 30 days. An order counts when the customer's last AI visit came within 30 days, whether they bought on the site, by phone, by chat, or in a store. The visitor-ID stitch sees 18% to 20% of web-first store orders, so store sales are reported as a floor.
- Report share of company sales. Each source's stitched sales divided by all ERP sales in the same window and purchase channel, in basis points.
- Estimate AI Overview losses keyword by keyword. Weekly rank tracking records which keywords show an AI Overview, weighted by impressions. A keyword-level click-through model puts the loss at 48.5% of clicks on an impression that shows an Overview. That loss is one of seven causes in the organic decomposition, which sum exactly to the observed change.
- Pull AI Overview citations by connector. Conductor's AI search data by MCP connector: how often the site is cited, its rank among cited domains, and which prompts cite it. SimilarWeb exposure as a cross-check.
- Refresh daily. The page builds only after yesterday is complete in Adobe CJA, then deploys to the dashboard hub.
What it showed
| Month | Lost to AI Overviews | Sent by AI assistants |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 2025 | 2.2% | 1.3% |
| Oct 2025 | 0.8% | 2.0% |
| Nov 2025 | 6.2% | 2.5% |
| Dec 2025 | 6.4% | 2.5% |
| Jan 2026 | 7.9% | 2.5% |
| Feb 2026 | 10.0% | 2.3% |
| Mar 2026 | 11.8% | 2.9% |
| Apr 2026 | 10.4% | 3.7% |
| May 2026 | 10.0% | 4.1% |
| Jun 2026 | 10.3% | 3.2% |
| Jul 2026 | 10.5% | 2.3% |
| Aug 2026 | 13.1% | 2.7% |
AI Overviews. From January to August 2026 they cost 10.6% of Google organic visits and accounted for 19% of the total organic decline against 2024. On unbranded searches, where Overviews actually appear, the August loss rate was 19%. The brand's head term never showed an AI Overview. Its click loss came from the local pack and knowledge panel answering on the page.
The loss shows up as fewer orders, not lower conversion. The visits AI Overviews take are unbranded organic visits, which convert at 63% of the site rate. Site conversion rose by 1 basis point. Ecommerce sales lost to AI Overviews were 0.7% of ecommerce sales from January to August 2026.
AI assistants. Visits from AI assistants rose 275% in the first 38 weeks of 2026 against the same weeks of 2025. ChatGPT sent 95% of them. Stitched sales from those visits went from 2.75 to 7.34 basis points of company sales. On the website cart alone, they went from 12.9 to 54.9 basis points.
AI Overview citations. In the week of July 12, 2026, the site was cited in 420 of 2,699 tracked AI Overview prompts. It ranked fifth among cited domains with a 2.46% citation share, behind YouTube at 7.4%, Google at 4.2%, the Sleep Foundation at 3.6%, and Reddit at 2.7%. Google's AI Mode, from February 2026, multiplied impressions on tracked terms four to five times with no change in clicks.
What changed
- AI assistants are reported as their own source on the dashboard hub, with stitched sales and share of sales. The site's standard channel rules still file them under Organic. The dashboard identifies them independently.
- The 2026 business review carried an AI Overviews line: the 2026 loss and a 2027 scenario in which unbranded exposure rises from 39% to 77% of impressions, costing about 1.4% of ecommerce sales in 2027.
- One known gap: clicks from inside AI Overviews and AI Mode arrive with a plain google.com referrer and count as Organic. Conductor and SimilarWeb are the proxy until Google reports them.
Technical notes
Denominator. Both monthly series divide by the Google organic visits the site would have had without AI Overviews: visits received plus visits lost. Divided by visits received instead, the August 2026 loss is 15.0%.
AI Overview loss. Exposure is the impression-weighted share of tracked unbranded keywords showing an Overview: 39% in August 2026. The click penalty comes from ln(CTR) on Overview presence with keyword and month fixed effects: a flat 48.5%. The resulting loss enters the organic decomposition as one of seven causes, allocated so all seven sum exactly to the observed change against the 2024 baseline.
Visit basis. Adobe CJA raw export, quality-filtered visits with real pageviews, one-event untagged ghost visits and the internal app excluded, main-domain landings only. An AI visit is identified on its first pageview by utm_source or an exact referrer-host match. Exact host, not substring, because a substring rule on one engine's domain matched article URLs.
Stitched orders. The omnichannel order table at order grain, joined on visitor ID, plus web purchases with no omnichannel order for that visitor. Credit goes to the last AI visit within 30 days before the order. Store orders count only when web-first. Stitched sales are not calibrated to ERP; the share-of-sales denominator is ERP written sales, non-void, net of returns, on the same purchase channel.
Months. Retail months on a 4-4-5 calendar. Each ends within a few days of the calendar month named.
Related: the organic decline decomposition this builds on, brand search, the data mart, and the dashboard suite. Or back to all work.