EXPERT OPINION BY PAM DIDNER, B2B MARKETING CONSULTANT AND AI STRATEGIST

Jul 26, 2026

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There’s a page on your website that receives roughly a quarter of your AI-referred visitors, and I’d wager nobody at your company has looked at it this year. It’s your internal search results page—the screen a visitor sees after typing a question into your site’s search box.

Previsible’s new study of 6.77 million AI referral sessions across 166 websites found ChatGPT sends 28.8 percent of the traffic it refers straight to internal search results. Across industries, the figure holds near 25 percent, stable across verticals and time. This isn’t a glitch awaiting a patch. It’s structural to how these systems retrieve information.

The AI chose your company. It couldn’t choose the page

Here’s the mechanism, because it should change how you value the visit. When ChatGPT recommends your company, the model has already made the expensive decision: your domain is the trustworthy answer, chosen over every competitor. What it often can’t determine is which page best fits the person’s needs—so it drops them into your search box and lets them finish the job.

Read that as a handoff. The AI did the hard part, then passed a high-intent visitor to a feature most companies treat as furniture—a box in the header nobody owns and nobody measures. Your search results page is now a landing page. Nobody designed it to be one.

And these are visitors worth the attention. SimilarWeb data reported in June found AI-influenced visitors view 12 pages and spend 11.8 minutes on site, against 6.5 pages and 5.6 minutes for everyone else. Roughly double the engagement, delivered to your least-managed pages.

AI-referred buyers skip the funnel you paid for

The rest of the landing-page data tells the same story from different angles. AI-referred ecommerce visitors land on product pages—43 percent of that traffic—with purchase intent already formed. In education, 52 percent land directly on course pages. In health, 42.1 percent land on About pages, because people vet the source before they trust the content.

The pattern: AI-referred visitors arrive mid-decision, deep inside your site, on pages your campaigns never touch. The homepage you redesigned last year isn’t in their path. The pages that are—search results, product detail, About—usually carry the least leadership attention. Your ad budget is optimizing an entrance that your fastest-growing visitors no longer use.

Give your search results page an owner and a number

Fixing this is not a technology project. It’s three decisions an owner can make this week.

Assign an internal search an owner. One person is accountable for what a visitor sees after they type. Give that owner a number: conversion of AI-referred visits by page type, because a site-wide average hides where this traffic concentrates. In Previsible’s data, a single page type can run at a multiple of a site’s overall AI-traffic rate.

Run a ten-search test. Once a quarter, have someone type your customers’ 10 most common questions into your own search box and grade what comes back: is the right page in the top 3 results, is it current, and does it answer the question? If the top result for your best-selling service is a 2019 press release, that’s the first impression a quarter of your AI-referred visitors get.

Make the money information machine-readable. If your pricing lives behind “contact us,” an AI system has nothing concrete to work with when a buyer asks what you charge—so the buyer hears your competitor’s numbers instead. Hiding pricing used to be a topic of debate in sales strategy. In AI-mediated buying, opacity reads as absence. My advice to clients: give a price range for specific offerings whenever you can. I also know some enterprise deals are complex enough that open pricing isn’t realistic. Whether to show pricing is a strategic call, not a formatting fix.

AI visibility is a long war. Your search page is this quarter’s fix

AI systems now make the first cut in a growing share of buying decisions: they choose which companies the buyer sees at all. That visibility fight will run for years, and you’ll never fully control it. The second half of the equation hasn’t moved. AI decides who gets the visitor. Your website decides whether the visitor stays. One of those is a long war. The other is a page you already own—and could fix this quarter.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.