Website analytics are getting harder to trust: AI search summaries are cutting overall traffic, while AI apps and tools are increasingly showing up in the vague "direct" bucket instead of being properly attributed. Using real data from three sites over 2024–2026, this post shows search traffic share collapsing and direct traffic share surging, and I conclude by asking what this all means for anyone trying to understand how their website is actually being used.

An increasing challenge for those of us working in the world of website analytics is the impact on traffic from Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini. The traffic – or as I will come on to discuss, the lack of traffic – from such platforms is a relatively new phenomenon. However, it adds to other relatively recent challenges such as a rise in what is known as ‘direct’ traffic as well as the mysterious sounding source of traffic known as ‘dark social’.