More than half of all web requests now come from bots and AI agents, according to Cloudflare data cited by Digiday. The trend is already affecting digital advertising, but it also highlights why visibility in AI search is becoming increasingly valuable for brands.
Advertising agency GoFish reported an 80% year-over-year increase in bot traffic. Filtering this traffic from retargeting campaigns contributed to an average 20% increase in CPM for its clients.
But AI traffic is different from traditional bot traffic. Mellow Sleep told Digiday that visitors arriving through AI assistants convert several times better than average. British retailer John Lewis also reported that requests from AI agents increased from 0.3% to 2.5% within a year.
The reason is simple: while an AI agent is technically a bot, there is often a real person behind it looking for information, comparing products or deciding what to buy.
This could change how businesses think about search visibility. A customer may no longer visit ten websites before making a decision. Instead, an AI assistant can research those websites and recommend several products directly.
For brands, this means the goal is increasingly not just to attract clicks from Google, but also to become one of the sources and companies that AI assistants mention and recommend.
