Evidence

Does AEO actually work?

tapFunnel is new, so we have no client results to show you. These are other companies’ results — named, dated, and linked to the page they published them on, so you can check every one.

Companies reporting their own numbers

Four companies published what AI search did for them.

Each of these is a company reporting on its own traffic, not an agency reporting on a client it won’t name.

Ahrefs SEO software
12.1%
of sign-ups came from AI search
AI search sent Ahrefs 0.5% of its visitors but 12.1% of its sign-ups over a 30-day window — a conversion rate roughly 23× that of traditional organic search. Ahrefs published the caveat too: AI-search users click through about 75% less often, so the volume is small and the value is per visit.
Ahrefs, from its own web analytics · Source · Published 2025
Vercel developer platform
10%
of new sign-ups referred by ChatGPT
CEO Guillermo Rauch reported ChatGPT referrals climbing from under 1% of new sign-ups to 4.8% in March 2025 and 10% by April 2025 — roughly a tenfold move in six months, on a product bought by technical buyers who research before they sign up.
Guillermo Rauch, Vercel CEO, publicly · Source · April 2025
Broworks Webflow agency
27%
of AI-referred sessions became sales-qualified leads
Ninety days after implementing generative engine optimization, 10% of all organic traffic arrived from AI engines, 27% of it converted to SQLs, and time on site ran 30% higher than Google traffic. What they changed: FAQ, Article and Organization schema, content restructured around buyer questions, and TL;DR answer blocks.
Broworks, self-reported · Source · Published 2025
Apollo.io sales intelligence platform
63%
brand citation rate on AI awareness prompts
After five months of community-led work, Apollo reported being cited in 63% of AI awareness prompts and 36% of category prompts, alongside 1,100+ subreddit members and 33,400+ content views — the clearest published example of off-site sources, not just on-site pages, driving citation.
Apollo.io, reported via HubSpot · Source · Published 2026
Platform-scale data

And the same pattern at scale.

Single companies can be flukes. These two datasets cover enough traffic that they aren’t.

Adobe Analytics over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites
+31%
conversion rate from AI referrals vs other channels
Adobe’s panel found AI-referred visitors converted 31% better than other traffic, spent 45% more time on site, viewed 13% more pages, and were 33% less likely to bounce. AI-referred traffic to retail sites was up 693% year over year across the 2025 holiday season.
Adobe Digital Insights · Source · January 2026
Semrush study of 500+ commercial topics
4.4×
the value of a traditional organic visit
“The average AI search visitor is 4.4 times as valuable as the average visit from traditional organic search, based on conversion rate.” Semrush projects AI search overtaking traditional search on traffic volume in early 2028 — which is the argument for building the position before the volume arrives.
Semrush · Source · Published 2025
The honest reading

What this proves — and what it doesn’t.

What it supports

Traffic arriving from AI assistants converts at a materially higher rate than traditional organic traffic, across every dataset above, measured independently by companies with no shared interest. The buyer has already been pre-qualified by the assistant before they land on you — they arrive at the end of their research, not the start.

What it does not prove

Self-reporting. Every first-party number here was published by the company that benefited from it. Nobody audits these. We link the source so you can judge the methodology yourself rather than take our summary for it.

Attribution is unreliable in both directions. Many AI assistants strip the referrer, so a large share of AI-driven visits land in analytics as direct traffic. Most sites undercount AI traffic rather than overcount it — but that also means nobody’s number here is exact.

The advantage may narrow. Ahrefs says so themselves: current click-through rates from AI search are probably the highest they will ever be, because the format is still novel. Conversion advantage is not a permanent property of the channel.

Volume is still small. AI search is single-digit to low-double-digit percentages of traffic for most businesses. The case for acting now is the per-visit value and the growth rate, not the volume today.

None of these are our clients. No result on this page came from work tapFunnel did. When we have client results, they will appear here with the client’s name attached, measured the way our methodology describes, and not before.

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