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Brainlabs Tracks 10.5% Fewer Sessions as AI Referrals Rise 163% Across 54 Clients

The agency’s client data points to a harder measurement task: AI referrals are still small but produce more tracked actions, while some AI-originated visits may never appear in referral reports.

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Brainlabs Tracks 10.5% Fewer Sessions as AI Referrals Rise 163% Across 54 Clients
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Brainlabs’ data shows a striking split: across 54 clients, total web sessions fell 10.5 percent, even as referrals from AI platforms rose 163 percent to roughly 200,000 visits a month. The referral stream is still small, but it is unusually active. Visitors arriving from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Perplexity generated key events at one and a half times the rate of organic-search visitors. And AI-driven key events rose 335 percent over the period. Those events are broader than sales: Brainlabs includes purchases, newsletter signups, and scrolling to the bottom of a page. The analysis covers 14 months of analytics data, from January 2025 through April 2026, across clients in 19 sectors. It is not a representative sample of the entire advertiser market. Forty-six of the 54 clients saw traffic decline, with fitness, fintech, insurance, and consumer packaged goods among the harder-hit categories. Brainlabs identifies September 2025 as an inflection point, when AI Overviews appeared on at least 30 percent of U.S. search-results pages. The timing suggests a shift, but does not prove that Overviews caused it. There is also a measurement blind spot: if someone opens a destination in another browser window, an AI-originated visit may be recorded as direct traffic. The key question now is whether AI referrals keep growing as these systems expand into commercial searches, where traffic and attribution matter most.

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3 key points

Brainlabs’ analysis of 54 agency clients across 19 sectors points to a reshaped acquisition funnel: total sessions dropped 10.5% to 125.4 million, while AI-platform referrals reached about 200,000 monthly visits after rising 163%. Those visits were more engaged, producing key events at 1.5 times organic search’s rate, with AI-driven events up 335%. The dataset is not representative, and possible misclassification as...

  1. 01

    46 of 54 clients saw traffic declines; fitness, fintech, insurance, and CPG were among the hardest-hit categories.

  2. 02

    September 2025 marked Brainlabs’ inflection point, coinciding with AI Overviews on at least 30% of U.S. results pages—not proof of causation.

  3. 03

    ChatGPT supplied the largest share of AI-search referrals before and after September 2025.

A 14-month look at Brainlabs’ 54 clients finds search sessions declining as AI-platform referrals and tracked visitor actions increase. For marketing teams, the immediate challenge is measuring a smaller but more active referral stream when some AI-originated visits may be classified as direct traffic.

Brainlabs analyzed Google Analytics data from 54 clients in 19 sectors between January 2025 and April 2026. The roster included 24 U.S. firms, 24 British brands and six clients in other markets; 29 employed at least 1,000 people. It is a view of one agency’s clients, not the advertiser market as a whole.

The September inflection point

Brainlabs identifies September 2025 as a turning point, when AI Overviews appeared on at least 30% of U.S. search-results pages. Average monthly organic sessions in its dataset then moved from about 20 million to fewer than 15 million. The timing shows a change in the client set, not proof that Overviews caused the decline.

The referrals that arrive do more

AI-driven key events rose 335% during the period. Brainlabs counts purchases, newsletter signups and scrolling to the bottom of a page among those events, so the measure captures advertiser-relevant activity rather than sales alone. Referrals from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity generated key events at 1.5 times the rate of organic-search visitors.

Commercial queries are the next test

The results varied by category. Fitness, fintech, insurance and consumer-packaged-goods clients saw some of the largest traffic declines, while retail, beauty and entertainment had some of the smallest. Brainlabs says Overviews have appeared mostly on educational and discovery queries, though they are beginning to extend to transactional and commercial searches; it also attributes retail’s relative resilience to fewer Overview triggers on transactional searches.

ChatGPT supplied the largest share of AI-search referrals before and after September 2025. But Brainlabs says referrals can be understated when a user opens a destination site in another browser window and the visit is logged as direct traffic. Its recommendation is to track AI search in routine KPIs alongside referrals, traffic and conversion events when planning paid media.

Sources

  1. digiday.comIn Graphic Detail: How AI search has impacted the web traffic of over 50 advertisers

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