A Scrunch study relayed on 13 August 2026 by Search Engine Land measures that only 1.1% of the visits following a news-related AI conversation come from a link clicked in an assistant's answer. Most traffic goes through direct navigation, which shifts the focus: for a GSO agency in Luxembourg, measuring brand presence in AI answers matters as much as tracking referral traffic.
The facts
- After a news-related AI conversation, around 75% of subsequent visits come through direct navigation, 9% through classic search and 1.1% through a direct AI link, across millions of events analysed between February and June 2026 (Search Engine Land).
- When an assistant spontaneously mentions a publisher the reader had not named in the query, visits to that site rise by 10.6 percentage points the next day and by nearly 20 points over the week, compared with similar publishers not cited in the same answer.
- The effect is concentrated: large publishers capture 82% of the names spontaneously cited by assistants and 97% of the visits that follow.
Why does this figure underestimate the real effect of AI?
The 1.1% figure only measures the last click before a visit. Scrunch acknowledges this itself: a reader who talks to an AI, continues with a classic search, then comes back later by typing the URL directly, never shows up as “AI” traffic in attribution tools. The readers tracked were nevertheless 20.5 points more likely to visit a publisher in the week following a news-related AI conversation, without Scrunch drawing any proof of causality from it. The pattern is consistent with the 68% of Google searches that already end without a click: value moves to the answer, and the website collects only an indirect trace of it.
Two caveats apply before generalising. Scrunch sells AI visibility tools: the study is published with a described methodology, but it also serves a sales argument that logically pushes readers to look beyond referral traffic alone. And this data concerns news publishers: an e-commerce or B2B website does not necessarily follow the same pattern. Shopify reported in the second quarter of 2026 AI-driven traffic that had tripled year on year and conversions well above organic search: the opposite of the marginal traffic observed on the media side.
AIxH's view
This finding matches what we see with clients: AI referral traffic remains marginal, but presence among the sources cited by assistants weighs on awareness before the first click. None of our clients is a news publisher, so caution counts as much as opportunity: the logic of citation without a click is plausible in every sector, and its scale remains to be checked case by case. AIxH's SEO & GSO service adds this tracking, brand mentions, citations, presence in AI answers, to classic SEO reporting instead of assuming it from a sector study. If you want to know where your brand already appears in AI answers, a GSO audit gives a clear first snapshot.