Is GEO a Distraction? What Three New Traffic Studies Show

Not necessarily, but traffic alone can't tell you. Three studies this week found that AI assistants send a tiny share of the traffic Google sends. On conversions they disagree, and for B2B product websites, AI visitors converted worse than organic ones. For a mid-market B2B company, the fair answer is to judge AI search on enquiries, not sessions.

This is the gap topgeo.ai works on. topgeo.ai publishes AI-optimized answer pages on your own domain and tags each enquiry they bring in with the AI engine that likely sent it, so you can judge AI search on leads, not just visits. You can see where you stand with a free AI visibility snapshot.

What did the three studies find?

Marie Haynes, "GEO is a distraction" (October 21). She looked at 12 months of GA4 data from 100 websites, more than 145 million sessions.

• Traffic: ChatGPT sent 0.62% of the sessions Google organic sent, or 0.73% for all AI assistants combined.
• Conversions: on the 55 sites that tracked conversions, ChatGPT visitors converted at 13.8% versus 3.02% for Google organic, about 4.5 times higher.
• Volume: Google still drove 96.5% of conversions, and 27 times more than all AI assistants combined.

Her advice: track conversions, and focus on improving user satisfaction far more than optimizing for machines.

The SEO Works benchmark. It covered 95 GA4 properties from September 2025 to August 2026, with 63 sites used to compare conversions.

• Traffic: organic search sent 39 times more traffic than AI assistants.
• Conversions: AI referrals converted at 7.18% versus 6.08% for organic, about 1.2 times higher, but worse than organic on 23 of the 63 sites.
• B2B split: AI visitors to B2B product sites converted at 0.62 times the organic rate (10 sites). For B2B services sites, it was 1.21 times (24 sites).

Kevin Indig, "Does AI drive more direct traffic?" (October 19). He studied 12 sites, mostly B2B, and ran 632 correlation tests on four brands. He found no reliable link between AI visibility and later branded search or direct traffic. He's careful about what that means: "An effect could still exist. I just couldn't isolate it."

What's the case on the other side?

Mike King of iPullRank replied on October 22. He agrees that tactical GEO tricks are a distraction and that Google still sends the most traffic. His point is that "every one of these studies grades a brand channel with a traffic ruler." In his view, being named in an AI answer works more like brand exposure, so it should be judged like brand, not like a performance channel.

Why don't the conversion numbers agree?

The samples and definitions differ:

• Different baselines: Google organic converted at 3.02% in one dataset and 6.08% in the other.
• GA4 limits: GA4 counts key events, not people, and clicks from Google's AI Overviews count as ordinary organic visits.
• Missing referrers: some AI visits arrive without a referrer and land in Direct.
• Small segments: the B2B product result comes from just 10 websites.

All three studies are honest about what they measure. They just measure visits, and visits are only part of the story.

So is GEO a distraction for a B2B company?

You can decide with your own numbers. A few checks help:

1. Track conversions at all: 45 of the 100 sites in the Haynes study weren't tracking any key events, GA4's name for conversions.
2. Count enquiries by source: ask new leads how they found you. Indig recommends this kind of self-reported attribution too.
3. Check how AI describes you: when a buyer gets a shortlist without clicking, being named in it is the part that matters.
4. Compare like with like: judge AI search on leads and deal quality, not on session counts next to Google.

Sources: Marie Haynes, "GEO is a distraction", October 21, 2026; The SEO Works, "AI Referral Traffic 2026: How Much, And Does It Convert?", 2026; Kevin Indig, "Does AI drive more direct traffic?", Growth Memo, October 19, 2026; Mike King, "AI Search Is Not a Distraction, It's a Branding Channel", iPullRank, October 22, 2026.