What percentage of leads really come from ChatGPT? Analytics says under 2%. Companies that ask say 7% to 25%

1. The short answer

It depends on who is counting. Analytics and call tracking count a lead as AI-sourced only when the visitor clicked a link inside the chat, and on that definition the answer is under 2% everywhere and under 0.2% for local service businesses. Ask the customer instead and the answer is several times higher, because most people read the recommendation, close the chat and search for the brand by name.

I started pulling these numbers together after an r/SEO thread in September 2026 where a B2B marketer asked whether anyone had traced a real lead back to ChatGPT or Perplexity. He was explicit that he did not want mention counts or visibility scores. Twenty replies later he had a handful of anecdotes, one of them worth "nearly $10k MRR", and no figure he could put in front of a CFO. The week before, a small-business owner asking the same question on r/smallbusiness collected 82 comments and the same result.

The figures exist. They are scattered across vendor reports, founder posts and consumer surveys, and the statistics roundups that collect them drop all of them into one flat list, so "94% of buyers use AI" sits next to "0.17% of traffic" with no explanation of why both can be true. Below they are sorted into three layers, each checked against the original publication.

The same question, three ways of counting

Eleven published figures on one axis. The layers sit one to three orders of magnitude apart.

View as table

Layer	Study	Figure
Tracked by analytics	CallRail	0.073%
Tracked by analytics	Ahrefs	0.17%
Tracked by analytics	Octane11	under 2%
Asked or disclosed	Outfunnel	7.29%
Asked or disclosed	Webflow	8%
Asked or disclosed	Vercel	10%
Asked or disclosed	Ahrefs	12.1%
Asked or disclosed	Tally	25%
Buyer surveys	BrightLocal	45%
Buyer surveys	G2	51%
Buyer surveys	Forrester	94%

2. How many buyers say they use AI to research?

Between 45% and 94%, depending on the audience and how loosely "use" is defined. These are the numbers that open most conference talks, and they are real. They describe behaviour before a purchase. None of them says a lead arrived.

The BrightLocal jump from 6% to 45% in a single year is the one I would show a local business owner, because it comes with a second number. Of the 455 respondents who had used AI for a recommendation, 88% said they go and check the sources behind it. They look the business up. For a plumber or a dental clinic that check usually ends on a Google Business Profile, which is why the state of your reviews still decides whether the AI recommendation turns into a call.

3. What do companies that ask their customers report?

Between 7% and 25% of new leads or signups, from the few companies that have published a number. The cleanest of them is Outfunnel, because it is a plain "How did you hear about us?" field compared year over year: 0.75% of leads named ChatGPT or AI in the first half of 2024, 7.29% in the first half of 2025.

Three companies, the same climb in about a year

Share of new leads or signups attributed to AI assistants, as published by each company.

Outfunnel (self-reported leads)Webflow (new signups)Vercel (new signups)

View as table

Company	When	AI share
Outfunnel	H1 2024	0.75%
Outfunnel	H1 2025	7.29%
Webflow	October 2024	2%
Webflow	June 2025	8%
Vercel	about September 2024	under 1%
Vercel	March 2025	4.8%
Vercel	April 2025	10%

Two cautions before anyone pastes 25% into a pitch deck. These are self-serve software products whose buyers are developers, designers and marketers, the heaviest ChatGPT users there are. And companies publish a figure like this when it flatters them, so the sample is selected for good news. I read the range as a ceiling for a business with a technical audience. A roofing company should not expect it.

Outfunnel's table has a detail that gets less attention than the headline. Google search fell only from 19.57% to 17.25% over the same year, and "can't remember" dropped from 8.5% to 4.2%. AI did not replace search in their funnel. It took some of the answers people used to be vague about.

Cognism's 2026 inbound report points the same way from the other side: LLMs grew 345% year over year as a last-touch source for its MQLs, organic traffic fell 33.6%, and direct MQLs rose 6%. People research somewhere the site never sees and come back by typing the name.

4. What does analytics actually record?

Almost nothing. CallRail attributes 0.073% of inbound calls to AI search across about 20 million leads for small and mid-sized businesses. Octane11 puts AI search under 2% of 25 million B2B search sessions. Ahrefs found the average site gets 0.17% of its traffic from AI chatbots.

That is roughly seven calls in every ten thousand. If you run a local service business and someone shows you a dashboard with AI referrals as a line item, this is the scale to expect on it today.

The B2B funnel data is thin in a different way. HockeyStack followed LLM sessions through 118 accounts, and most of them had not closed a single deal they could trace to an LLM session.

The LLM funnel in the median B2B account

Stage-by-stage conversion across 118 accounts. Each rate is the median for that stage on its own, so they do not multiply into one end-to-end figure.

5.24%of LLM visits become a hand-raiser

→

2.66%of hand-raisers reach qualified pipeline

→

0%of that pipeline closed, in the median account

Nine in ten of those calls came from ChatGPT. That lead is real and it is shrinking: in Octane11's B2B sessions its share of AI referrals fell 14 points in five months while Gemini roughly tripled.

Which assistant the calls came from

Inbound calls to small and mid-sized businesses that CallRail traced to AI search, by assistant.

ChatGPT 90.1%Perplexity 6.3%Gemini 2.4%Claude 1.2%

ChatGPT still sends most AI referrals, and its share is sliding

ChatGPT as a share of all AI referrals to B2B sites, by month. The axis starts at 60% to make the six readings legible.

View as table

Month	ChatGPT share of AI referrals
Sep 2025	81%
Oct 2025	86%
Nov 2025	83%
Dec 2025	80%
Jan 2026	76%
Feb 2026	72%

Tracked volume is growing fast from that small base. Demandbase measured ChatGPT referral visits to the B2B sites it tracks going from about 645,000 a month in June 2025 to 2.6 million in June 2026, up 303%. Whether those visitors convert better than organic ones is a separate question with its own data, which I covered in AI referral traffic vs organic search.

5. Why is the tracked number 10 to 100 times smaller?

Because most people do not click the link in the chat. Similarweb followed real users in a US desktop panel after ChatGPT recommended a brand: they were 2.5 times more likely to visit that brand's site within seven days, and 55.9% of those visits came through a branded search. Analytics files every one of them under organic or paid brand.

Where the visit shows up after ChatGPT recommends a brand

More than half of the follow-up visits carry no trace of the assistant that caused them.

The visitors who do arrive that way are not casual. In the same panel they viewed 12.0 pages over 11.8 minutes, against 6.5 pages and 5.6 minutes for everyone else.

There are three ways an AI-created lead loses its label, and Radyant's attribution guide names them well. A copied URL or a click from the mobile app carries no referrer and lands as Direct. A buyer who reads the answer and then searches the brand lands as Organic or Paid Brand. And a recommendation with no link at all produces no event of any kind until the person shows up days later from somewhere else.

The BrightLocal finding from section 2 belongs here too. If 88% of AI users check the source before acting, then a second touch is the normal path and last-click will credit that second touch. What they find when they check matters as well. I collected the published figures on how often assistants get basic business facts wrong in a separate report, and a wrong phone number ends the journey before any attribution model gets a say.

Dreamdata's own instance shows the same leak from inside one company: LLM-surfaced content influenced 1.1% of its MQLs over twelve months and 6.2% of new business closed. The influence shows up late in the deal record, long after the session that would have carried the referrer.

6. All 17 figures in one table

Filter by layer to see like with like. Every row links to its source below, with the date I read it.

7. Estimate your own attribution gap

Two ways to size what your analytics is missing. The first uses your own form data if you already ask new leads how they found you. The second applies Similarweb's visit split, which is cruder: it assumes your AI-influenced visitors behave like that panel, where only 44.1% arrived by a route other than branded search. Treat the result as a rough floor and replace it with your own form data as soon as you have a month of it.

8. Four numbers I could not trace

While checking each figure against the publication it is credited to, four of the most repeated ones did not hold as credited. I have left them out of the table and list them here so nobody has to repeat the search.

• "Up to 30% of leads self-report AI discovery" (credited to Radyant's 2026 client data). It appears in several agency posts with that credit. Radyant's own attribution guide, as I read it on September 21, 2026, does not contain it. The guide uses "20% of your closed-won deals" as a hypothetical example. If there is a primary publication I will add it here.
• "Forrester: 94% of buyers use AI" linked to the press release. The figure is real, but the 94% in Forrester's press release of January 21, 2026 is about buyers in groups of six or more reporting benefits from the group. The AI-use 94% is in an analyst blog post published a day later. Many roundups link the wrong page.
• "CallRail: AI search converts at 14.2% against 2.8% for Google." The figure is real but belongs to someone else. It comes from Opollo's B2B tech data, which I cite in my conversion report. It is not in CallRail's press release, its marketing VP's published Q&A, or the Search Engine Journal write-up, yet at least one agency post credits it to the CallRail study.
• A weekly figure for Tally of 44% of signups from AI assistants. I found it only in search snippets. The 25% in the table comes from trade coverage quoting the co-founder directly.

9. What to do on Monday

Add one free-text question to every form and every first call: "How did you first hear about us?" It costs nothing and is the only signal that survives a closed tab. Outfunnel's series exists because they have asked it for years.

• Make it free text, not a dropdown. People write "chat", "ChatGpt", "asked AI" and "Perplexity then Google". A dropdown with no AI option is how the answer ends up under "Other".
• Ask about the first touch. "How did you first hear" and "what made you contact us today" get different answers, and you want the first.
• Read three signals side by side: the form field, AI referral sessions in analytics, and branded search impressions in Search Console. A rise in the first and third with a flat second is the pattern the Similarweb data predicts.
• Treat visibility scores as the leading indicator only. They move before leads do, and they are noisy. In my 60-query reliability test, the same prompt gave a different top brand in about one run out of five.
• Work on being the recommended name, since the click is rare. Which pages get cited depends on how the buyer phrases the question. I measured that split in AI citations by question shape.

For a local business the realistic reading is this. Tracked AI leads will stay a rounding error for a while, a growing share of the people calling you consulted an assistant first, and they verified you on Google before dialling. So the work still sits in the things they verify, which is what small business SEO has always covered. If you want to know whether assistants can name you at all, that is one of the checks in an SEO audit. The rest of my research is on the same theme, and how I work with clients is on the services page.

10. Methodology

I looked for every published figure that answers some version of "what share of leads, signups, calls or sessions comes from AI assistants", plus the survey figures usually quoted next to them. Searches ran on September 21, 2026 across Google, an academic index (OpenAlex, which returned nothing relevant - this question lives in industry data) and Perplexity, to see which sources assistants already cite for it. I read 31 pages and kept 18 sources.

Each figure was checked against the full text of the page it is credited to, not against the article quoting it. A figure is marked verified when the original states it with its method, cross-verified when the original was not retrievable and two independent reports agree (G2, Similarweb), and single-source when it rests on one disclosure (the Vercel and Tally founder posts, Dreamdata's worked example, Demandbase through trade coverage). Of 19 facts, 10 are verified, 4 cross-verified and 5 single-source. Twelve were published in 2026 and seven in 2025. Figures that could not be found at their credited source were dropped and are listed in section 8.

11. Limitations

The three layers measure different populations as well as different things, so the distance between them is not purely attribution loss. Part of it is that Tally's customers are not CallRail's customers.

Four more. Every source in the tracked layer sells attribution, call tracking or SEO software, and there is no government or academic dataset on this question. The disclosed layer is five software companies that chose to publish, so it is biased toward good news and toward technical audiences. Outfunnel does not state its sample size. And the figures span February 2025 to June 2026 in a channel where Demandbase saw monthly volume double in a single month, so the older ones are already low. I will re-check every row quarterly and date the changes.

12. Frequently asked questions

13. Get the data

Sources

1. BrightLocal (Rosie Murphy). "Half of consumers are asking AI for business recommendations" - Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 1,002 US adults. March 10, 2026. brightlocal.com/research/lcrs-ai-trust/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
3. Demand Gen Report. "Half of B2B software buyers now start their research with AI chatbots: G2" - G2 2026 Buyer Behavior Report. 2026. Second report: MarketScale, August 19, 2026. demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/half-of-b2b-software-buyers-now-start-their-research-with-ai-chatbots-g2/52737/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
4. Forrester (John Buten). "B2B buyers make zero-click buying number one." January 22, 2026. forrester.com/blogs/b2b_buyers_make_zero_click_buying_number_one/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
5. Outfunnel (Andrus Purde). "The rise of AI in B2B discovery: what our latest lead source data reveals." June 17, 2025. outfunnel.com/b2b-lead-sources-the-rise-of-ai/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
6. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, on X. "ChatGPT now refers 10% of new Vercel signups." April 2025. Earlier post, March 2025: 4.8%. x.com/rauchg/status/1910093634445422639. Accessed September 21, 2026.
7. Webflow blog. "How we're optimizing for AI search at Webflow (and what we've learned so far)." 2025. Cross-check: Graphite case study, "Webflow 2x'd sign-ups from LLMs". webflow.com/blog/inside-aeo-strategy. Accessed September 21, 2026.
8. Foundation Inc (Ethan Crump). "How Tally tapped into GEO to drive 25% of new users" - quoting co-founder Marie Martens. Updated February 3, 2026. foundationinc.co/lab/tally-geo/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
9. Cognism. "Inside Inbound 2026: the truth about what's driving growth." 2026. cognism.com/reports/inside-inbound-2026. Accessed September 21, 2026.
10. Ahrefs (Patrick Stox). "Does AI search traffic convert better than traditional search? For Ahrefs, yes: 0.5% of visitors drove 12.1% of signups." June 16, 2025. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-search-traffic-conversions-ahrefs/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
11. CallRail. "Analysis of 20M leads reveals how AI search is driving customer discovery." Press release, January 27, 2026. Industry breakdown: citybiz Q&A with Emily Popson, VP of Marketing. prnewswire.com/news-releases/analysis-of-20m-leads-reveals-how-ai-search-is-driving-customer-discovery-302671219.html. Accessed September 21, 2026.
12. Ahrefs (Xibeijia Guan). "63% of websites receive AI traffic (new study of 3,000 sites)." February 6, 2025. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-traffic-study/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
13. Octane11. "State of B2B AI Search", Vol. 1, Q1 2026 - 25 million sessions, September 2025 to March 2026. April 8, 2026. octane11.com/insights/insights-state-of-b2b-ai-search/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
14. HockeyStack Labs (Amulya Vadrevu). "LLM traffic in 2025: early performance, real intent, uneven results" - 118 accounts. hockeystack.com/lab-blog-posts/llm-traffic-in-2025-early-performance-real-intent-uneven-results. Accessed September 21, 2026.
15. Dreamdata. "Tracking LLM influence on pipeline and revenue" - worked example on Dreamdata's own data. dreamdata.io/recipe/tracking-llm-influence-on-pipeline-and-revenue. Accessed September 21, 2026.
16. PPC Land. "ChatGPT referrals to B2B sites gain 303% in a year, Demandbase finds" - Labs by Demandbase release of August 12, 2026. ppc.land/chatgpt-referrals-to-b2b-sites-gain-303-in-a-year-demandbase-finds/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
17. PPC Land. "Your analytics are lying: Similarweb traces AI recommendations to real traffic" - Similarweb, "The Downstream Impact of AI Visibility", June 21, 2026. Second report: Search Engine Journal. ppc.land/your-analytics-are-lying-similarweb-traces-ai-recommendations-to-real-traffic/. Accessed September 21, 2026.
19. Radyant. "How to get attribution right in AI search." 2026. radyant.io/guides/ai-search-attribution. Accessed September 21, 2026.
20. r/SEO. "Has anyone traced a real B2B lead back to ChatGPT or Perplexity recommending them?" September 17, 2026. The thread that prompted this report. reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1wixtkm/. Accessed September 21, 2026.

Published: September 21, 2026. Compiled and checked by Stanislav Peev. Next scheduled re-check: December 2026. A figure looks wrong or you know a primary source I missed? Email me and I will fix it and date the fix.