Ahrefs: AI now drives more signups than YouTube, but most of its influence is untraceable
More than one in five people who sign up for Ahrefs say they found the company through ChatGPT or Claude, putting AI assistants ahead of YouTube as a source of signups and behind only Google. Ahrefs published the figure alongside a guide to measuring AI search visibility, arguing that referral traffic alone badly understates how much AI influences buying decisions.
The company's own data shows how concentrated attributable AI traffic is. On wordcount.com, an Ahrefs-owned site, ChatGPT accounts for 92.4% of AI search visitors, Perplexity 4.6%, Gemini 2.7% and Copilot 0.2%. Six per cent of AI search visitors sign up for a free Ahrefs account, four times the organic search conversion rate.
Ahrefs recommends seven signals for measuring AI visibility, including AI referral traffic and conversions in analytics, asking customers how they heard about the brand, and watching direct traffic for unexplained rises after AI content pushes. It notes that many AI platforms strip referrer data and that buyers often read an answer and then search the brand name, so those visits land in direct traffic where they cannot be identified.
For brands trying to justify AI search investment, the practical implication is that tracked revenue will always undercount the channel. Ahrefs suggests recording direct and no-referrer traffic before any AI work, then comparing after each content push, and valuing any unexplained increase at the existing direct traffic conversion rate.
Reported by Ahrefs Blog ↗
Topics: ChatGPT, Measurement, Citations