An analysis of 2,089 brands found AI-referred visitors convert at 3x the rate of visitors from Google Search, but most analytics tools can't see them.
ZURICH, Feb. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- AI platforms now send measurable traffic to websites, but most of it is invisible. An analysis of 2,089 brands by Loamly found that 77% are completely absent from AI platform responses, and the ones that are visible see visitors who convert at 3x the rate of Google Search.
The scale of what's being missed is growing fast. Adobe measured 4,700% year-over-year growth in AI referral traffic to e-commerce sites. A Conductor study of 3.3 billion sessions found AI traffic averaging 1.08% but reaching as high as 64% for some sites. Even those numbers likely undercount, because most AI platforms don't pass referrer data and analytics tools log the resulting visits as "Direct."
The analysis found that the biggest predictor of whether AI platforms mention a brand is not website optimization. It is off-site authority: Wikipedia presence, Reddit discussions, YouTube content, and news coverage. Companies with a Wikipedia article scored 3.6x higher on average. Technical website optimization correlated 3.1x weaker than these off-site signals.
The platforms also rarely agree with each other. ChatGPT and Gemini cited the same brands only 19% of the time, suggesting that visibility on one AI platform does not guarantee visibility on another.
"We had a customer discover that a double-digit percentage of their conversions were coming from AI referrals. It was all sitting in their Direct traffic bucket in Google Analytics. They had no idea," said Marco Di Cesare, founder of Loamly. "The pattern keeps repeating. Companies are getting revenue from AI and attributing it to something else."
Loamly identifies AI visitors by detecting bot crawl patterns and matching returning visitors to the queries that triggered them. When connected to Stripe, it also attributes revenue to specific AI-referred sessions. The sample of 2,089 brands ranges from solo founders and early-stage startups to established mid-market companies, predominantly in technology and B2B services.
Site owners can check how visible their brand is to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity for free at www.loamly.ai/check (no signup required).
Full analysis with methodology, statistical tests, and data visualizations: www.loamly.ai/blog/ai-visibility-research-2100-brands-2026
About Loamly
Loamly tracks traffic from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity that Google Analytics misclassifies as Direct. It shows what visitors asked, which pages they landed on, and whether they converted. Based in Zurich, Switzerland. www.loamly.ai
Media Contact
Marco Di Cesare, Loamly, 41 787139970, [email protected], www.loamly.ai
SOURCE Loamly
Share this article