What is conversion rate?
Conversion rate is the share of visitors to a site who complete a desired action, such as a purchase or a signup, out of everyone who arrived.
It is one of the oldest and most trusted numbers in marketing precisely because it sits close to revenue. What is changing is the mix of visitors behind that number. As more traffic to a page originates from an AI answer rather than a traditional search click, the people who do decide to visit have usually already had the topic explained to them before they arrived.
That pre-qualification can push conversion rate up even as overall visit volume from that source stays modest, because the casual, still-deciding browsers filtered themselves out earlier in the AI conversation. Comparing AI-referred conversion rate directly against search-referred conversion rate, without accounting for this difference in who actually shows up, tends to understate how valuable that smaller, more-informed group of visitors is.
Related
- Referral trafficReferral traffic is the set of visits to a site that arrive by following a link from another site or platform, identified by the referrer information the browser sends along.
- Click-through rateClick-through rate is the percentage of people who saw a link, ad, or citation and then clicked it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
- Attribution modellingAttribution modelling is a marketing analytics method for deciding how much credit each touchpoint a customer interacted with, an ad, a search click, an email, deserves for an eventual conversion.
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