Five Minute Findings

If someone asks ‘how much traffic do we get from AI?’, you’re about to get a better answer. Well, in part.

Over the next few weeks, check GA4 for sessions tagged as coming from Gemini. If you haven’t already, set up a custom channel group that puts AI assistants together so that you can compare them against organic search.

One warning. If Gemini traffic suddenly jumps, that probably isn’t growth. It’s the same visitors, finally wearing the right name badges. Expect direct traffic to dip by a similar amount, and don’t report either change as a win or a loss until you’ve compared the two.

This is the most interesting new ad channel in years, and nobody yet knows what it’s worth. Both of those things are true at once.

If you test it, test it the way Vodafone is. That is to say, judge it on what it adds across the whole customer journey, not just last-click conversions. ChatGPT is mostly a research tool, so expect it to start journeys that finish somewhere else. A channel judged only on last-click sales will look worse than it is.

And before spending anything, get your product information in order. Ads that land people on thin pages with vague descriptions will only lead to wasting money in a shiny new platform, which is still wasting money.

AI is very good at some parts of SEO that require data analysis or heavy lifting, like sorting crawl data or drafting first version outlines of content based on your ideas. It’s much less good at knowing when a best practice doesn’t apply to your site.

So use it, but treat it like the new apprentice who has read every SEO blog and once watched a video on the subject, but never actually worked on your website. Check anything it suggests or changes before it goes live, especially noindex tags, canonicals, and robots.txt. Those three can quietly remove pages from Google, and you may not notice until the traffic has gone.

If an AI tool recommends something that doesn’t make sense, ask it why. Sometimes the honest answer is that it doesn’t know.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because last month’s Five Minute Findings said much the same. The industry is slowly reaching an uncomfortable conclusion: the dashboard was never telling the whole story.

You don’t need to bin attribution. Just stop treating it as the truth and back it up with two other kinds of evidence.

• Something that shows exposure, like how often AI tools mention your brand.
• Something people tell you. Add a “How did you hear about us?” question at checkout or on your enquiry form. It’s cheap, and the answers are often surprising.
• Something the business can bank, like sales, enquiries or revenue.

When all three move together, you can be reasonably confident. When they don’t, that’s where to dig. And for your biggest channels, a simple incrementality test still beats any model. Just turn something off in one region and see what actually happens.

A small blue box won’t change the world. It might change your click-through rate, though, and on Microsoft Ads that’s worth noticing.

Microsoft Ads tends to get treated as Google Ads’ quieter sibling. You copy campaigns across once and then leave them alone. When the ad design changes, the ads that suit the new layout usually do better. Three simple checks:

• Make sure your favicon is clear and recognisable at a tiny size. If the test sticks, it’s the first thing people will see.
• Look at your headline and description. In a compact box, the first few words carry everything.
• Watch Microsoft Ads click-through rate over the next few weeks. If it moves without you changing anything, a test like this may be why.