Ramp’s AI search visibility rose from 3.2% to 22.2%, and why that matters

The independent data published in 2025 and 2026 points the same direction. Pew Research Center watched the real browsing of 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025: when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, versus 15% when it didn’t, and they clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords and found the presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average click-through rate, up from 34.5% in its April 2025 study. Bain’s consumer survey found about 80% of people rely on zero-click results at least 40% of the time. AI assistants themselves still send only about 1% of web traffic on average, per Similarweb, although ChatGPT referrals grew 52% year over year and Gemini’s grew 388%.

Two findings turn this from bad news into a plan. Seer Interactive, across 53 brands and 5.47 million queries, found that being cited inside the AI Overview delivers 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited, and that brands not cited saw click-through fall 67% over 2025. And the visitors who do arrive from AI are worth more: Adobe’s analysis of more than a trillion visits to U.S. retail sites in the 2025 holiday season found AI-referred traffic up 693% year over year and converting 31% more than other sources, and Semrush estimates an AI search visitor is 4.4 times as valuable as an organic one, based on conversion rates.

Ramp’s SEO team built pages shaped like the questions buyers ask an assistant: “Accounts Payable Software for Small Businesses,” “Accounts Payable Software for Large Businesses,” “Top 6 Accounts Payable Automation Software,” “AI in Accounts Payable.” Profound reports AI visibility (the share of tracked prompts where the brand appears) rising from 3.2% to 22.2%, a gain it describes as happening within a month, along with more than 300 citations and a move from 19th to 8th among fintech brands. 1840 & Co. first analyzed which competitor pages the engines were citing, then published one post with clear headings, bullet points and the brand named directly; visibility went from 0% to 6% in two weeks and 11% by month’s end. Both are vendor case studies, “visibility” is Profound’s own metric, and neither reports leads or revenue.

Chegg told investors its non-subscriber traffic “plummeted to negative 49% in January 2025,” down from a modest 8% decline in mid-2024, and sued Google. Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff in May 2025; CEO Barbara Peng wrote that “70% of our business has some degree of traffic sensitivity.” A year later it had raised original and exclusive content from 40% to more than 80% of its output, and exclusive stories showed almost two times the subscription conversions of non-exclusive ones. The pattern: content an answer engine can reproduce loses first; content it has to cite, or can’t reproduce, holds.

Google says advertisers activating AI Max for Search campaigns typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar cost, with L’Oréal reporting a 2X higher conversion rate at 31% lower cost per conversion and MyConnect 16% more leads at 13% lower cost per action. Microsoft reports ads in Copilot earning 73% higher click-through rates and 16% stronger conversion rates than traditional search. Both are platform-reported. ChatGPT ads launched February 9, 2026 for U.S. users on the Free and Go tiers. In April 2026, Digiday reported that pilot CPMs had fallen from $60 to as low as $25 and the minimum spend from $250,000 to $50,000. OpenAI opened a self-serve Ads Manager beta to U.S. businesses on May 5, 2026 with no minimum spend, and cost-per-action bidding was announced in late May. No advertiser results had been published at that point. Perplexity, which had fewer than a dozen advertisers in its test as of early 2025, phased the ads out that year and said in February 2026 it had no plans to bring them back.