Do AI assistants actually send customers to local businesses?

An assistant that cites a page sends a click like any other referrer, and it is countable if you are counting. A utm_source of chatgpt.com in the request's query string tells you ChatGPT sent the visit. A perplexity.ai referrer in the Referer header tells you Perplexity did. OAI-SearchBot in your access logs tells you that you were crawled for search, and ChatGPT-User tells you a user's question fetched your page.

The first two are not the same mechanism, and conflating them loses data. ChatGPT tags its outbound links with a UTM parameter. We have no Perplexity documentation stating that it does, so Perplexity referrals are treated as a referrer rather than a tagged source — match only on utm_source and those visits land in direct and disappear.

The crawler names are documented in OpenAI's crawler reference, which is what makes a log line readable rather than guesswork. If you are not logging the query string and the referrer, you have no referral data — which is not the same as having no referrals.

Three figures get quoted for this and none is a primary source: a share-of-traffic percentage, a conversion-rate comparison against organic, and a consumers-trust-AI survey result. All are vendor studies, and quoting one here to look confident would be the opposite of the point.

What we are doing instead, dated. This cohort adds an [ai-referral] log line recording the assistant token, the path and the time — no IP, no user-agent string, no email, and no bot check, because the record is made by the browser. When it has run long enough to say something, the number goes on this page with its sample size and its date.

Until then this page's honest answer is: the mechanism is documented, the volume is unmeasured by us, and anyone quoting you a percentage got it from a vendor. One limit stated plainly — the count will be a floor, because a visit with JavaScript off is not counted.