Bring live Ahrefs data straight into ChatGPT & Claude

Want live Ahrefs data inside ChatGPT and Claude?
Plug real-time keyword metrics and backlink profiles straight into your AI prompts.
Query live SERP data without manual CSV exports or custom code.
Build efficient AI agents instantly.

I’ll start with a confession. I really tried to believe in AI search.

I wanted it to be the next big thing. Every week there’s another thread telling me that SEO is dead, that ChatGPT is the new Google, that if I’m not tracking prompts, I’m already behind.

So I paid attention. I tracked it for our clients. I looked at the numbers every month.

And after all that, I truly think AI search is overhyped. At least for e-commerce, at least right now.

Let me show you how I got there.

Last week an AEO/GEO agency was all over my feed. Big headlines, lots of buzz.

I’m a nosy loser, so I did what I always do when an agency gets attention. I went through the brands they worked with and the case studies they published.

It was a nice mix. Some SaaS, some e-commerce, some B2B, a bit of everything in between. Honestly, some really cool brands they’d worked with over the last year.

Every single case study was about the same thing. Mentions. Citations. Prompt tracking. Visibility in AI answers.

And I’ll give them their flowers here. Based on what I checked, the number of prompts those brands showed up for was really growing. The prompt quality was meh, but that’s a separate issue.

So on paper, it’s a success story. The brands show up more in AI search than they did a year ago.

Then I opened the other tab.

Over the same period those brands were “winning” in AI search, every single one I checked was losing a shit ton of organic traffic in classic search results.

Not a little. Somewhere between 50% and 80% of organic traffic, gone, over the year they worked with the agency.

I want to be careful here. I don’t know what was going on inside those companies. Maybe there was a migration. Maybe someone else owned SEO. Maybe the agency never touched the classic search side at all.

But that’s kind of my point.

If your client gets a few more prompts in ChatGPT while losing 80% of their SEO traffic, is that a win? Is anyone in that boardroom celebrating?

The only way it makes sense is if AI search traffic brings something like 1000x the revenue of SEO traffic. That’s what you’d need to make up for that kind of drop.

I doubt it. And I don’t have to guess, because I can look at my own clients.

We have AI search wins too. I’m not pretending we don’t.

We have clients where AI search went from zero to seven figures in revenue. Those are cool cases, and I’m proud of them.

But here’s the part nobody puts in the case study.

With those same clients, we make nine figures through SEO.

Seven figures sounds amazing on a LinkedIn post. Next to nine figures, it’s a rounding error. The revenue coming through AI search is, in comparison, smaller than my chances of getting a compliment from a girl in high school.

When I average it out across our clients, AI search traffic brings 0.3 to 0.5% of revenue.

And the part that surprised me most is that this number hasn’t really moved in the last two to three years. All the hype, all the “SEO is dead” posts, all the new tools for prompt tracking. And the share of revenue sits in the same tiny band.

That doesn’t mean it will stay there forever. It means that right now, in our data, the channel paying the bills is still the boring one.

I know what some of you are typing already.

“But Patryk, what about AI-influenced traffic? People see your brand in ChatGPT, then come back later through direct, branded search, or another channel. Last click doesn’t capture it.”

Fair. I believe some of that happens. Someone asks an AI for a recommendation, sees a brand name, and two days later types it into Google. That’s real behaviour, and attribution is messy.

But let’s be honest about the size of it.

Will that influence move the needle so much that it outweighs a 50 to 80% drop in organic traffic? Will it make up for losing most of the channel that was probably doing half your revenue?

I really struggle to see it.

“AI-influenced” has become a bit of a magic phrase. It can’t be measured properly, so it can be stretched to cover almost anything. And when a metric can explain away an 80% traffic loss, I’d argue it stops being a metric and starts being a story.

This whole thing made me appreciate what we actually do.

Technical SEO isn’t sexy. Nobody’s writing headlines about fixing crawl budget on a site with millions of URLs, or cleaning up faceted navigation, or getting the dev team to ship the thing that’s been stuck in the backlog for nine months.

But that’s the work that makes sites work better. And sites that work better make money.

I much more enjoy sitting in my hole, making sites work and watching revenue move, than jumping on whatever the hype train is this quarter. It’s less glamorous, and it’s much more fun when the client’s numbers go up.

I hope I can share more of the case studies we’re working on soon. Some of them I can’t name yet, but the charts speak for themselves.

To be fair to the other side: there are probably brands that rely more on AI search than on classic SEO. Some SaaS products, some niche B2B, some categories where people genuinely ask an AI before they ask Google. If that’s you, your data will tell you, and you should follow it.

The point of all this isn’t “ignore AI search.” It’s to remember both.

Grow in AI search if it makes sense for you. Track the prompts, earn the citations, enjoy the wins.

Just don’t neglect the SEO that’s still doing probably 50% or more of your revenue. Don’t let a growing visibility chart distract you from a collapsing traffic chart. And if someone sells you a case study, open the other tab.

P.S. I really want to cross 10k subscribers this year. If this issue made you think, forward it to one person who’s currently being told SEO is dead.

Want a quick check? Reply with your “CHECK” and your e-commerce domain. I'll tell you whether your structure, your technical issues, or more are making you lose actual revenue.