ChatGPT recommendations drive more website visits, Similarweb finds

Similarweb’s latest look at AI visibility found that a brand recommended by ChatGPT was 2.5 times more likely, on average, to get a website visit within seven days than a direct competitor. The U.S. desktop study covered finance, travel and beauty, and it shows that AI mentions are turning into measurable traffic, not just name recognition.

Similarweb calls The Downstream Impact of AI Visibility its first study to connect AI visibility with downstream business impact. The analysis used the company’s proprietary real-user panel and panel-based clickstream data, not modeled estimates or survey recall. User journeys were tracked from July 2025 through December 2025, with a supplemental survey in January 2026. The study excluded people who had visited a brand in the previous four weeks or who explicitly named the brand in their prompt, tightening the focus on the recommendation effect itself.

The gains showed up inside each category. In finance, an American Express recommendation pulled more American Express visits than Capital One visits, and the same pattern held when Capital One was the named brand. In travel, Skyscanner and Kayak each gained an edge when ChatGPT recommended them. In beauty, Sephora and Ulta saw the same lift when they were the brand in the answer. That matters because the study was not just measuring whether AI mention volume rose, but whether recommendation order changed who got clicked next.

The engagement numbers were stronger than many marketers would expect from AI-driven traffic. Visitors influenced by AI viewed 12 pages and spent 11.8 minutes on site, compared with 6.5 pages and 5.6 minutes for other visitors. The traffic mix was also revealing: 55.9% of AI-influenced visits came through search, versus 40.4% of non-AI-influenced visits. Direct traffic accounted for 19.9% of AI-influenced visits, compared with 38.8% of standard visits. In other words, a ChatGPT recommendation often does not arrive in analytics as a clean AI referral at all. It can show up later through search or direct, which makes attribution look weaker than the demand actually is.

The findings fit Similarweb’s broader push to measure AI search as a competitive channel. In March 2026, the company framed authority, not just scale, as the differentiator in AI answers and pointed to brands such as B&H, Adorama, iFixit, Reuters and ScienceDirect as standouts. The June study pushes that logic further: visibility in AI answers is starting to shape who gets the visit, how long that visitor stays, and which channel gets credit after the click.