Two numbers published on 4 September describe the same year and refuse to agree. Semrush’s clickstream panel puts ChatGPT at 1.09 billion US visits in July 2026, ninth among all American websites. The Google Analytics channel built to record visits arriving from AI assistants reported 0.47% of traffic for the publisher Search Engine Land’s Greg Jarboe examined.

Neither number is wrong. They measure different things, and the gap between them is where most marketing teams are currently trying to plan. The traffic shift is visible at internet scale and largely invisible inside a single company’s analytics, which makes it easy to argue about and hard to budget for.

What do the Semrush numbers actually show?

Semrush’s July 2026 figures, set against July 2025, record growth at ChatGPT and a collapse at Bing. Chatgpt.com reached an estimated 1.09 billion US monthly visits, up 48.38% year on year, moving it to ninth among US websites and past both DuckDuckGo and Bing. Bing fell 50.43%, the steepest decline in the top 20. DuckDuckGo fell 15.83%.

Google grew. Its US visits rose 10.72% to an estimated 25.3 billion a month, roughly 23 times ChatGPT’s figure. The comparison that gets quoted, ChatGPT up 48% against Bing down 50%, leaves out the platform that still receives the overwhelming majority of American web visits and is receiving more of them than a year ago.

Two other movements matter to a B2B audience. LinkedIn rose from 21st to 19th, up 15.48% to 473.7 million visits, entering the top 20 in this dataset for the first time. TikTok, at 14th with 573.6 million visits, grew 1.63%, which is close to flat. Generative AI is not standing in for a general shift towards new platforms. It is the specific thing that moved.

The provenance belongs on the record. These are Traffic Analytics panel estimates drawn from a clickstream panel Semrush puts at roughly 200 million anonymised users across desktop and mobile, not first-party reporting from OpenAI, Microsoft or Google. Search Engine Land, which published the analysis, is owned by Semrush. The Helm has previously reported on how a Semrush headline figure travelled further than its evidence supported, and the same discipline applies here: the direction is well supported, the decimal places are modelled.

Is this AI replacing search, or adding to it?

The data describes addition rather than substitution, at least at the level of visits. Google grew 10.72% in the same twelve months that ChatGPT grew 48.38%, so the reading in which AI assistants are consuming search demand does not survive contact with the larger of the two numbers. What the figures show is a new destination growing quickly alongside an old one that is still growing.

Bing is the exception, and it is a real one. A 50.43% fall in a year is not a rounding artefact, and it is the clearest signal in the dataset that the second-choice search engine has lost its reason to exist for many users. For marketers who maintained Microsoft Advertising as a cheaper parallel channel, the audience behind that spend has halved on these estimates in twelve months.

One more distinction keeps the ChatGPT figure honest. A visit to chatgpt.com is not a search. Semrush’s own earlier clickstream work, covering more than a billion lines of US data to February 2026, found that between 65% and 85% of ChatGPT prompts do not resemble standard keyword queries, and that ChatGPT triggered a web search on 34.5% of queries, down from 46% in late 2024. A billion visits to an assistant is not a billion opportunities to be found by one, and The Helm has reported that B2B referrals from ChatGPT rose 303% while rival assistants stalled, which is a much smaller base than the visit count implies.

Why can a marketing team not see this in its own analytics?

GA4 added a native AI Assistant channel on 13 May 2026, and in the publisher data Jarboe examined it has attributed 0.47% of traffic since. The channel tracks visits arriving from ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot and Grok. It excludes Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode entirely.

That exclusion is the part worth carrying into a reporting conversation. The AI surface most likely to sit between a B2B buyer and a supplier’s website is the one inside Google’s results page, and it has no dedicated channel in Google’s own analytics product. Traffic from it lands in the organic search bucket, where it is indistinguishable from a conventional click.

The baseline problem compounds it. Standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, and Google began rolling out AI Overviews to US users on 14 May 2024. The industry lost its comparable measurement history roughly ten months before the behaviour it would want to measure against that history began changing.

The practical response is unglamorous. Treat a default channel label as one imperfect signal rather than a complete account of how a visitor arrived, investigate unexplained direct traffic rather than assuming an AI origin for it, and read panel data from Semrush, Similarweb or SparkToro alongside first-party analytics rather than in place of it. A rise in direct traffic is evidence of a measurement limit, not evidence of an AI referral.

GA4’s AI Assistant channel excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the traffic Google’s own AI surfaces send carries no label of its own.