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

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.