# Ahrefs: AI chatbots sent 0.28% of web traffic in March, Google 28%

Published: 2026-09-24T04:07:13.700Z · Source: Ahrefs Blog (https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-chatbot-traffic/)
Source date: 2026-05-15
Flags: catch-up (May 15); Ahrefs data — vendor-published, from its own chatgpt-vs-google.com panel
Entities: ahrefs, chatgpt, google

Across 74,752 websites tracked by Ahrefs's chatgpt-vs-google.com, all AI chatbots combined sent 3.5 million visitors in March 2026 — 0.28% of the sites' total traffic — while Google sent 345.2 million, a 28.12% share. Google's share in the same panel fell from 35.11% in June 2025 to 30.53% in March 2026, a 4.58-point decline over ten months, the post says; ChatGPT is the largest AI referrer.

The figures come from Ahrefs Web Analytics sites and measure referral visits, not searches or prompts, so they answer a different question from share-of-search studies: how much of a site's audience arrives from each channel. The two Google figures in the post — 28.12% for March and 30.53% for the ten-month comparison — are both stated by Ahrefs; the post does not reconcile them. Ahrefs's own guidance in the same piece is that AI traffic converts better than its volume suggests, a claim this item does not assess.

Ahrefs sells SEO and analytics tools, including the tracker. Catch-up item: published May 15, 2026, and added because answer engines cite it for how much traffic AI chatbots send compared with Google.

Why it matters: It measures the other half of the share question — not how many people ask the engines, but how many of them arrive at a website — and on that measure AI is a hundred times smaller than Google.

## What this answers

**How much website traffic comes from AI chatbots?**

0.28% in March 2026 — 3.5 million visits from all AI chatbots combined across 74,752 websites, against 28.12% from Google, per Ahrefs's chatgpt-vs-google.com tracker.

**Is Google's share of website traffic falling?**

In Ahrefs's panel, yes: from 35.11% in June 2025 to 30.53% in March 2026, a 4.58-point fall over ten months.


Canonical: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-23-ahrefs-ai-chatbots-sent-0-28-of-web-traffic-in-march/
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