Is LLM Traffic More Effective Than Organic Traffic? A New Study Based on Data

Hey guys, it’s Alex Bazooka. Right now, the biggest question in SEO isn’t if AI search will hurt organic traffic; it’s already occurring. The main question is if LLM traffic really converts better than organic search.

For months, many in the industry have been saying that referrals produced by AI are “higher quality” and more likely to convert. After all, shouldn’t someone who gets a personalized recommendation from ChatGPT or Perplexity be better qualified than someone who just clicks through a regular SERP?

The data tells a story that is far more complex. And to be honest? This isn’t what most of us thought it would be.

The most recent research results are in, and they are surprising.

Amsive did a big new study that looked at six months of GA4 data from 54 websites with confirmed macro conversions. They discovered that LLM traffic converted at 4.87% and organic search traffic converted at 4.60%. It seems like AI traffic won at first glance, doesn’t it?

Not so fast. When researchers used statistical tests, the 0.27 percentage point difference that seemed to be there wasn’t statistically significant (p-value of 0.794). Translation: The difference could just as easily be due to chance.

But this is when it truly gets intriguing. When they only looked at sites with more than 100,000 sessions, the difference grew to 5.81% for organic and 7.05% for LLM, but even then the edge didn’t pass statistical testing.

The Scale Reality Check

This is the most important part that everyone has to know: Less than one percent of all sessions in the statistics came from LLM referrals. Organic search, on the other hand, made for about a third of all visits and conversions.

We’re talking about making a channel that gets less than 1% of traffic work better. About nine out of 10 websites, on the other hand, saw LLM traffic make up less than 0.6% of sessions.

Checking my data

So i have one big website with data. It is a Travel niche website. Organic traffic is 40% of a Total traffic of this website. Traffic from Chat GPT is a less then 1% of a Total.

Here is all organic Conversion Rate graph:

As you can see here stable more 5% of Conversion Rate at last 14 months.

Screen below is Conversion Rate but only from Chat GPT traffic.

As you can see last actual Conversion Rate is 5.3%. So bassicaly its super close to organic, but have a trend of growing. But again, Serch traffic is 40% of a total, and ChatGPT traffic is less then 1%.

The “High-Quality AI Traffic” Story Is More Complicated Than We Thought

The idea that AI traffic converts better is based on logic: if ChatGPT or Perplexity suggests your product after a chat, that person should be more qualified than someone who is just looking at search results.

HockeyStack’s most recent statistics shows that the bounce rate for LLM traffic is still significant, at 26.3% on average. However, those who do stay tend to stay longer, with the average LLM session lasting more than 3 minutes.

The Problem with Context with this research

Most individuals miss this important thing: A lot of the time, LLM-driven sessions start without any context. Users come in the middle of a conversation, a problem, or a search, depending on how the model set up your content.

With traditional search, visitors see a title and meta description that set their expectations. With AI referrals, however, there can be a big difference between what the user expected and what they see on your site.

Differences Between Industries Tell a Different Tale

We can see patterns when we look at the data by industry. Financial services and travel had greater conversion rates from LLMs, whereas e-commerce and consumer services preferred organic traffic.
In most areas, organic traffic is better in getting people to interact than LLM referrals. For example, in Consumer Ecommerce, organic traffic has a higher Key Event Conversion Rate (24.12% vs. 17.14%) and in Travel (28.97% vs. 24.25%).

But this is when it gets fun: LLMs did better in only a few areas: Health (13.24% vs. 12.88%), Careers (22.31% vs. 16.58%), and Catalog websites (2.34% vs. 2.13%).

The Growth Path You Can’t Ignore

The growth numbers are so big that they make it hard to tell who the winner is right now.
From January to May 2025, the number of sessions referred by AI went up by 527%, from 17,076 to 107,100. That’s not a mistake.

Performance Data for Each Platform

Perplexity has shown to be the most useful source based on real-world data, bringing in the most traffic and the best conversion rates. ChatGPT is the second most useful source.

According to traffic statistics from November 2025, ChatGPT is currently six times bigger than Perplexity. ChatGPT’s search traffic is up 44% month over month, while Perplexity’s is up 71%.

The Split Between B2B and B2C

When we divide the data by business model, we may see some interesting patterns:

From LLM referrals, B2B sites converted at 2.03% and from organic traffic, they converted at 1.68%. From LLM referrals, B2C sites converted at 10.31% and from organic traffic, they converted at 8.50%.

Neither difference was big enough to be reliable after testing for significance, but the general trends show that AI search may prefer different types of questions and levels of intent.

How This Will Affect Your SEO Plan in 2025

After looking at all this data, I think we’re looking at the wrong metric.
The change in traffic composition is what important, not the conversion rate parity.

The Homepage Traffic Effect

A recent study of 50 national websites indicated that AI Overviews and LLMs increased homepage traffic by 10.7%. This is a big deal because the conversion rates for homepages are usually 3–8%, while the rates for the whole site are only 1–4%.

In other words: Even if your total traffic goes down, you could still experience net positive conversions if AI is sending more qualified customers to your pages that convert the best.

The Attribution Problem

This is something that most studies don’t look at: LLM traffic today is irregular, low-volume, and sometimes misinterpreted, yet it’s already providing considerable value in certain areas. According to a recent study, the average AI search visitor is 4.4 times more valuable than the average visit from traditional organic search, based on the conversion rate. But this goes against what other research have found, showing that the way measurements are done is important.

Strategies that can be used in the AI search era

Based on all of this information, here is what you should really be doing:

Keep an eye on LLM traffic the right way

First, make sure your measurement is correct. Set UTM parameters for AI platforms, keep an eye out for unusual spikes in direct traffic, and mark up anything that appears in ChatGPT or Perplexity.
It’s likely that most sites are underreporting AI traffic because it’s being counted as direct or referral traffic without giving credit to the right source.

Make the landing page work without context

Pages should not presume any context. If someone comes from ChatGPT or Perplexity, they probably skipped everything that usually happens before the visit.

People who come in the middle of a conversation without any of the regular search journey context need to be able to access your content.

Concentrate on the Appropriate Content Types

LLMs like literature that is easy to read, neat, and scan. Think about bullet points, short introductions, FAQ sections, and compelling summaries.

To make sure that AI can find your site, use FAQ schema markup, make sure your pages load quickly, and provide structured data for content and author information.

Keep an eye on citations across platforms

ChatGPT likes Wikipedia and other informative sites, while Perplexity likes YouTube videos and other specialized sites. You have to optimize for various platforms because they don’t share many sources.

The Bottom Line: Conversion Rates Don’t Tell the Whole Story

We can say for sure what we know after looking at all the 2025 data:

• When you use the right statistical tests, LLM traffic doesn’t always convert better than organic search.
• The scale is currently quite small (less than 1% for most sites), but it is increasing at an unparalleled rate.
• The type of firm and the industry matter; some verticals are really benefiting.
• The types of pages that get the most traffic are changing.
• It’s still hard to draw clear conclusions because the measurements are still jumbled.

What I suggest? Don’t try to get higher LLM conversion rates by optimizing for them; the data doesn’t support it yet. Instead, work on making AI more visible today, while the other companies are still figuring it out.

The teams who get going early will stay in the public eye and get a long-lasting edge over their competitors. You will already control the AI search real estate in your specialty by the time everyone else catches up.

The change in thinking from “Does LLM traffic convert better?” to “How do I capture LLM traffic that’s already converting well?” will be what makes the winners stand out from the losers in 2025.

Want to keep an eye on how visible your AI is? Begin tracking brand mentions on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other sites by using industry-specific questions. The data from this year shows that we’ve moved on beyond the experimental stage. AI search optimization is now a must-have for businesses, not just a nice-to-have.