Great example of why I'm so skeptical about this whole AI Visibility phenomenon.
By Randfishkin · October 2, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Great example of why I'm so skeptical about this whole AI Visibility phenomenon.
The screenshot below comes from Semrush's latest analysis of traffic and AI visibility to a digital sector. This one's for "manufacturing & industrial domains," a relatively unhyped B2B space with a truckload of revenue. Semrush, thanks to clickstream data, can see not only referrals that ordinary analytics cannot (those without a referrer string, or to devices with ad blockers, etc.).
IF it were the case that AI visibility and direct traffic were correlated, we'd see their trendlines looking similar. But that's not what's going on. Measurable traffic from AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, etc.) fell by -3.9% this year, while direct traffic rose +5.3%. Are they connected at all? Are people actually using AI tools to get information or research brands in this sector? How much?
We. Don't. Know.
There's no gold standard, heck there's not even a frickin' tinfoil standard for how much prompt volume there is in a given space. AI Visibility tools and providers are hoping and praying that people are actually using these tools to do this type of research, sending their synthetic prompts and then measuring brand presence percentages month over month on the wish and a prayer that those types of prompts are popular with their customers. The best a report can do is what you see in Semrush's data here, which is:
- Almost no traffic comes from AI tools
- We don't know how much volume there is
- Here are the most visible brands based on a bunch of prompts that some people might use, maybe, but we don't know
- And here's lots of quite-excellent data about every other channel/source (search, social, direct, PR, media, etc.)
I'm not saying no one in aeronautics looks up Boeing's products in their AI tool. I'm saying that until and unless we know how many people that is, and how it compares to other sources, it's real weird to throw massive budgets into investing and tracking that one sector at the expense of every other channel.