New research from Similarweb has tracked thousands of real user journeys across finance, travel and beauty, following people for seven days after ChatGPT recommended a brand in response to a query.

Key findings:

• Users were 2.5 times more likely to visit a brand's website after ChatGPT recommended it over a competitor - even with no clickable link and no prior visit history.
• AI is used earliest in the journey - 35% of people turn to AI tools when discovering or getting initial ideas, well ahead of search (13.6%). Search only catches up at the point of purchase.
• When people do visit the AI-recommended brand, they engage more deeply: nearly twice the pageviews and time on site versus a standard visitor.
• Because AI rarely sends a trackable referral, most of this traffic shows up in search and direct instead - meaning brands are likely underestimating how much AI is actually influencing them.
• The flip side: if you're not the brand ChatGPT mentions, a competitor is - and they get the visit, the engagement and the conversion.

AI chatbots don't invent brand recommendations from nothing - they're pulling from what's been written about a brand: press coverage, editorial mentions, "best of" round-ups, expert quotes. In other words, the same PR-driven earned media that's always built brand credibility is now also the raw material large language models draw on when they answer a user's question. Earned media is fast becoming AI-visibility infrastructure: PR is increasingly what gets your brand cited when someone asks ChatGPT for the best serum. A brand with strong, consistent editorial visibility across trusted titles is simply more likely to be the one ChatGPT recommends - and, per this study, more likely to get the resulting site visit.

That's exactly where Dd earns its keep - not just as a contacts list, but as a verified industry map connecting the right story to the right editor. That's no longer just about today's readers, it's about tomorrow's AI answers too!

Source: Similarweb, "The Downstream Impact of AI Visibility" (2026) - similarweb.com