• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, November 7, 2025

Marketers are signaling that conversion and click rates are lower with AI-driven search engines, but some evidence shows this traffic may actually convert more effectively. It's unrealistic to expect anything beyond gradual progress, but do advertisers have the patience as the advertising industry transitions to a new online model?

Recent claims of better performance come from Clarity, Microsoft’s free analytics tool that tracks website activity with heatmaps and session recordings. Given the source, I can understand that advertisers might seem skeptical about the findings, but as more consumers use AI assistants and large language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and AI Mode or AI Overviews, results will change.

Clarity analysts reviewed more than 1,200 publisher and news sites during the past eight months and found traffic from AI-driven platforms such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity grew more than 155.6%, while search sent 24% of traffic, social came in at 21.5%, and direct traffic at 14.9%.

Despite all this growth, AI referrals still account for less than 1% of overall traffic. While LLM referral traffic may be comparatively small with traditional methods, traffic sent by LLMs seems more likely to convert. 

Subscription conversions followed a similar pattern, with the pairing of search with LLM traffic converting at 1.34%, with search at 0.55%, direct traffic at 0.41%, and social media at 0.37%.

Clarity’s data showed referrals from Microsoft Copilot had the highest subscription conversion rate, converting at 17x the rate of direct traffic and 15x the rate of search traffic.

Perplexity came in second with 7x the conversion rate of both channels, and Gemini rounded out the top three at 4x and 3x the rate of direct and search, respectively. Traffic from Perplexity and Gemini had the highest conversion rates for sign-ups. 

Direct traffic conversion rates demonstrated consistent underperformance across both sign-ups and subscriptions in Microsoft Clarity data. The 0.13% sign-up conversion rate and 0.41% subscription conversion rate for direct traffic suggest users arriving without clicking on referral context converted at lower rates than those directed by AI assistants.

Social-media traffic demonstrated better conversion performance. It outperformed direct traffic for sign-ups at 0.46% but fell behind search for subscriptions.

Search-traffic conversion rates came in at 0.15% for sign-ups and 0.55% for subscriptions, positioning it as the strongest traditional channel despite falling behind AI platforms.

It's unrealistic to expect anything beyond gradual progress as the advertising industry transitions to a new online model. And waiting for the increase in performance is about as frustrating and annoying as waiting for things to change in the U.S. 

I often wish for a time machine to go back to "when the web was young" and "publishers obsessed over bookmarks and homepage visits," similar to the way Clarity explained in its blog post. "Then came the age of search, when search engines like Google and Bing became the front door, the first place people went to access the rest of the internet."

Search rewrote online discovery. AI will do it again.