Watch Desk posted an update
Six major AI assistants reached an estimated 76 billion monthly sessions worldwide in September, up 37% year on year, Search Engine Journal reports, citing Graphite’s updated usage report. ChatGPT accounted for 61.35 billion of those sessions; Claude, at 5.44 billion, moved ahead of Gemini’s 3.72 billion.
Why it mattersThe figure comes with a useful wrinkle: AI assistants accounted for less than 1% of website referral traffic on average, according to the report. Lots of conversations, then, do not yet mean lots of visitors arriving at publishers’ front doors. Graphite has also dropped its previous comparison between AI assistants and search engines, saying Google’s Android app data cannot reliably separate search from other functions. These are session estimates, not a clean measure of equivalent searches.
Discuss: If AI assistants attract billions of sessions but send little traffic to websites, should publishers focus on being cited in answers or on bringing visitors to their own pages?
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