An annual growth rate of 7% seems harmless until you realize it doubles growth in 10 years.
Only 14% of U.S. Americans have tried ChatGPT.3 They’re early adopters.
Over 170 million more could join the trend in the next years (assuming 334 million Americans minus ~35% for age), which should skyrocket referral traffic even more. And that’s just the U.S.
On the flipside, organic traffic is flat to down for many B2B companies. In my sample set, organic traffic grew only 1.1x between January and November on average.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
When considering constant growth rates, over one-third of organic traffic could come from AI Chatbots in three years.
In the sum total, AI chatbot referrals would make up over 34% of traffic. Two companies in my set of six are projected to get more than double as much traffic from AI chatbots than from search engines.
Referral to organic traffic ratio projections:
Today: 0.14% (January – November).
In a year: 0.79%.
In two years: 5.7%.
In three years: 52%.
Note that we don’t yet know whether AI chatbots cannibalize search engine usage one-to-one or whether we’ll do both.
I have a hunch it’s going to be the latter because AI adoption will happen in phases, and overall usage could increase because LLMs are so capable.
That’s also why my projection chart has a higher total as AI chatbot adoption grows in year 3, which means more potential traffic for B2B companies instead of less.
Of course, this is a small case study of only six B2B companies, and growth rates likely won’t stay constant.
Most projections are wrong, but this exercise helps to put in perspective how quickly the status quo can change.
Implications
My advice is clear: Don’t bank on steam engines. Bank on the power grid.
AI chatbots show early signs of compound growth that could become significantly faster than we can intuitively grok.
Here is what I tell my (B2B) clients:
Monitor LLM crawlers, referral traffic, and conversions by landing page to figure out which content gets crawled and performs well in AI chatbots.
Track your keywords as questions with a house-made, API-based tracking system or proprietary LLM tracking tools. Monitor visibility ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot/Bing, and Gemini because we don’t yet know whether “AI chatbot optimization” will lead to the same results for all chatbots, similar to how SEO is very similar for Google and Bing or whether they will reward different approaches.
Test net-new content and content adjustments to provide better answers in AI chatbots. Now is the time to write the playbook.
Keep doing classic SEO since AI chatbots still lean heavily on their results to ground answers.
1 The Residential Adoption of Electricity in Early Twentieth-Century America
2 Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Set to Lead AI Spending Surge with $90 Billion CapEx in 2025, Says Morgan Stanley
3 A majority of Americans have heard of ChatGPT, but few have tried it themselves
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal