🚨 Fantastic research from @Similarweb , with @randfish on The Downstream Impact of AI Visibility, showing something that’s critical for marketers to understand: AI influence can happen without a click, and this is why measuring AI Search impact only through “AI referral traffic” is not enough. The study found that: * Brands recommended by ChatGPT were 2.5x more likely to receive a visit within the following 7 days vs. competing brands that were not recommended. * Search was the dominant downstream channel for AI influenced visits: 55.9% of AI-influenced visits came through Search, meaning users often remembered the brand recommended by AI and later searched for it. * Your branded SERPs are now even more important: If AI-influenced demand is coming back through Search, you need to make sure your branded, brand + product, and brand comparison results are well optimized, protected, and aligned with what users saw in AI answers. * AI-influenced users engaged more deeply once they reached the site: They viewed almost twice as many pages and spent around twice as long on site compared to non-AI-influenced visitors. This is the key point: Invisible brands don’t only miss the AI mention but risk losing the downstream visit! The tricky part is that most of these visits won’t necessarily appear in analytics as “AI traffic”, making AI’s impact easy to underreport. Our current attribution models have a blind spot: AI-influenced demand often arrives through Search and Direct, not through AI referrals. So, what should marketers do? ✅ Don’t measure AI impact by referral traffic alone ✅ Treat AI visibility as a leading indicator of demand ✅ Protect and optimize your branded SERPs ✅ Connect AI recommendations with later search, traffic, engagement, and conversions ✅ Benchmark AI visibility against competitors, not only in isolation See the research here: similarweb.com/corp/the-down…