After analyzing a year of traffic to sites built on its platform, Duda has found AI is no longer just a “future consideration” for growth, but an “active, measurable source of traffic.”
“Between March 2025 and February 2026, human website traffic to analyzed websites from Al sources has increased 73%,” says the 2026 Al Visibility for SMB Websites report, “with ChatGPT driving the majority (57%) of that traffic.”
AI crawlers were also responsible for performance gains, proving to be a “reliable way to measure how ‘visible’ a website is to an LLM.” Of the sites analyzed by Duda, AI crawlers helped with 3.2 times more human traffic and 2.7 times more form submissions.
Site performance from AI crawlers (Photo Source: Duda)
“Commonalities were found among websites with high visitation rates from Al crawlers,” the report says. “Particularly, these websites had implemented certain features, or installed certain apps. The greatest combination of features was the implementation of Google Business Profile synchronization, local schema, dynamic pages, and the presence of a blog.”
The visibility measured by blogs specifically was particularly interesting, as the report found that each additional published blog increased AI crawler-visits to the site “by a median 7%,” with each additional site page “increased visits by a median 4%.”
“Al systems are visiting SMB websites, and they are referring traffic,” the report says. “Considering the impact location-specific optimizations like local schema and Google Business Profile synchronization have on crawler visits, it can be inferred that local queries are driving at least some of this crawler traffic.”
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FAST FAQ
Does blogging actually improve AI search visibility?
Absolutely, as the research shows each additional published blog post increased AI crawler visits by a median of 7%, while each additional site page increased visits by a median of 4%. For publishers and SMBs, this means a consistent publishing cadence is now a direct lever for improving AI discoverability, not just SEO rankings on traditional search engines.
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