Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO at Botify, a leading agentic and AI search optimization solution for brand visibility.
Already at 50% and rising, bot traffic to websites will only become more impactful as AI search technology continues to evolve and consumers shift their search habits.
Understanding and managing bot traffic is critical to a successful, future-proof online visibility strategy. As new AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity seek to compete with Google, they’re putting more resources into learning about consumers, building proprietary indexes of websites and aiming to become a consumer’s sole interface when making purchases.
As such, their crawler bots are becoming more prevalent. In fact, my company’s global vice president of consulting services, A.J. Ghergich, recently shared research that showed that traffic from AI bots has more than doubled for our e-commerce clients since February of this year.
These bots aren’t stopping anytime soon. In fact, they’re likely to ramp up even more as adoption of AI search increases and AI technology accelerates with the introduction of agents, AI-powered programs that can do the shopping for the consumer.
It’s a virtuous cycle: Though Google has the majority of search market share, AI usage will ramp up as the tech evolves. Personalization will become more accurate, meaning more satisfying experiences for consumers, and they’ll trust agents to do more for them, from answering informational questions to buying products on their behalf. The result is an influx of bot traffic to websites.
Search behavior is shifting—so must your strategy.
This traffic surge is reshaping how we define success, and many brands are still scrambling to figure out which metrics matter. Traditional consumer search behavior is typically reflected in a stat like: Impressions are up 9% year-over-year, and clicks are up 6%.
This year, the stats might look different. Based on data from 167 e-commerce and retail clients, year-over-year impressions are up 31%—but clicks are down, dropping 1% compared to 2024. Consumers are still searching—they’re just clicking less, likely because of AI summaries. As a result, the purchase cycle is shrinking.
Now, brands need to figure out: What actions should be taken today? What does this mean for Black Friday? Is traffic still a relevant metric?
That’s why I’ve outlined a four-step framework for AI search success, one that helps brands adapt to new consumer behavior, align with AI engines and stay discoverable in a fast-moving landscape where bots are the new gatekeepers of attention.
Step 1: Assess risks and current opportunities.
AI search is building on traditional search, but it brings some major setbacks for brands. For example, AI usually doesn’t know when products are on sale, when they’re sold out or when stock quantities change. AI doesn’t automatically reflect on your latest marketing campaigns or pull from your latest updates.
Therefore, if you’re not actively managing how your site appears to AI over time, you’re losing control of your most critical touchpoints.
Step 2: Control how you appear in generative AI results.
As generative AI models expand, they’re pulling information from your site to understand your business and provide reliable information to consumers. To make sure they mention your brand in the right context, AI platforms train their model with your website’s content.
Because training needs to be done in a closed environment, once set, new data can’t be added to the model. That’s why AI platforms use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to gather more recent information, crucial for the consumer’s experience. They rely on your site’s structured data and context to summarize your brand, positioning, products and prices.
Optimizing for AI starts with understanding how search engine bots and AI bots are behaving on your site. You’ll need to conduct an AI technical audit and an AI intent audit, define a strategic roadmap, set rules for AI access to your content and redefine how you measure success. Your AI bot governance plan should include clear rules on what content should and shouldn’t be used for training, protocols for log file analysis and determining which AI platforms you want to appear on.
You should also make sure the way your brand is represented on AI platforms aligns with your goals and values. If not, you’ll need to investigate where they’re sourcing incorrect or outdated information, then take action to fix the issue—that may mean removing content from your site or blocking AI bots from accessing it.
Step 3: Empower your team with automation.
Now more than ever, your site content should be aligned with consumer intent and technically optimized so that AI bots and agents can find the information they need fast. But that’s not scalable when you have 20,000 product detail pages to update in time for Black Friday.
This is where automation and agents can play a role in your tech stack. Some tools can help to retrofit existing content with intent signals, updating metadata and structured data at scale.
Step 4: Iterate for AI based on data.
You need to start thinking about measurement differently. Rankings, clicks and even traffic are already giving way to a visibility-based model.
The key question becomes: Are we visible? To whom? For what? Right now, you can use log files combined with traditional analytics to get a picture of how AI bots are engaging with your content. Over the next three to eight months, expect a shift from keyword-based tracking to visibility tracking across AI platforms, where metrics like citation frequency and generative share of voice (SOV) will become the new benchmarks of success.
A First-Mover Advantage Is Within Reach
Future-proofing your AI search visibility starts today. Early studies show that AI traffic may be of better quality and convert at a higher rate than traditional search engine traffic.
That means there’s a world of opportunity for companies, both enterprise and high-growth brands, that want a first-mover advantage—but only if they understand what’s happening in search, why it matters and the steps they can take right now to stay ahead of the competition.
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