What is the AI search impact?
In the months since the marketing world declared Google’s demise at the hands of AI assistants, something unexpected has happened: the data arrived…and it told a very different story. Read on to discover what the AI search impact really is in the modern search era.
According to the landmark Kaiser & Schulze (2025) study of 973 e-commerce websites representing over $20 billion in annual revenue, ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM) platforms are barely registering as meaningful sources of e-commerce traffic.
After a year of tracking, ChatGPT referrals made up less than 0.2% of all e-commerce sessions. That’s some 200 times smaller than Google’s organic search. Even more strikingly, those visits convert 86% less often than affiliate traffic and about 13% worse than organic search.
In other words, while AI assistants have dominated headlines, Google is still dominating the internet’s actual shopping carts.
The Hype vs. The Receipts
AI evangelists promised a retail revolution. ChatGPT would compare, recommend and sell directly. Brands were told to “optimise for LLMs” or risk becoming invisible. But when researchers actually examined 50,000 LLM-driven transactions against 164 million from traditional channels, the revolution looked more like a rounding error.
ChatGPT drives some conversions, but mostly for lower-value, single-item baskets. Users follow ChatGPT links, glance, and often leave to “re-Google” the same product to confirm the AI’s recommendation.
That “verification behaviour,” as the study calls it, is exactly why Google continues to win: trust.
The Trust Dividend: Google’s Quiet Strength
For two decades, Google has trained users to verify. To compare. To check multiple sources before committing. In contrast, ChatGPT asks for trust up front. That’s a tall order in commerce, where money changes hands and reputations are on the line.
When you think about it, this “verification loop” might actually make Google stronger. Every AI referral that prompts a user to double-check a brand name or product price sends them right back into the search engine’s ecosystem where paid ads, reviews, and established SEO infrastructure await.
That’s why Google might have the last laugh. Because the supposed “AI search revolution” is, for now, still driving people straight back into Google’s arms.
Why Data Still Decides the Story
At Trimontium, we’ve seen cycles like this before. The Metaverse gold rush. The NFT advertising bubble, The “voice search takeover.” Each one began with spectacular promises and ended with the same question: what does the data say?
“In digital strategy, stories sell, but data decides,” says Dr Peter Appleby, Chief Data Science Officer at Trimontium.
“AI is an extraordinary assistive tool, but assistive doesn’t mean dominant. The brands that win are the ones that measure first and invest second. Our job at Trimontium is to make sure clients don’t chase mirages, they chase measurable outcomes.”
The data-first mindset is critical here. LLM traffic isn’t meaningless, it’s just early, fragmented, and economically inefficient. There’s potential for long-term value, especially as AI platforms develop affiliate-style monetisation and trusted purchase pathways, but those systems don’t yet exist at scale.
For now, search remains the spine of commercial discovery. Every major e-commerce dataset, every performance metric, every conversion trend still points to the same conclusion: Google isn’t dying, it’s quietly adapting.
What Smart Brands Should Do
Instead of swinging from “SEO is dead” to “AI is everything,” the smartest brands are treating LLMs as a test channel, not a replacement. They’re tracking referral performance, auditing landing pages for deep links, and strengthening remarketing systems to catch those “verification” clicks when users inevitably return via search.
That’s where the Trimontium approach comes in: pair experimentation with evidence, not enthusiasm. Test AI discovery, yes, but don’t cut the search budget that’s still paying the bills.
The Takeaway for AI Search Impact
The “AI traffic revolution” made a splash, but the data shows a ripple. ChatGPT referrals are real, but small. Google referrals are smaller than they were five years ago, but still hundreds of times larger.
AI may eventually reshape commerce, but if you look at the receipts instead of the rhetoric, you’ll see that Google isn’t the past. It’s still the platform everyone, including AI shoppers, comes back to. It all highlights how marketers must adapt in the modern search era.
By Trimontium Insights Team
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