How much real traffic, how many actual form submissions, how many real phone calls does AI visibility actually deliver?
We finally have the data to answer that question, and the numbers are bigger than anyone expected.
I just unpacked the biggest AEO study I’ve ever seen across two podcast episodes with my friend Shawn Davis, who runs content and communications at Duda. This is not theoretical. This is real data from 858,000 real websites and nearly 70 million AI crawler visits in a single month. Watch the full video above to learn more.
If you run a local business, build websites for one, or sit inside an agency, the next 10 minutes will change how you spend the next 30 days.
Why This Study Matters
Most AEO content right now is opinion dressed up as methodology. Shawn and his team at Duda looked at 858,000 real websites and tracked nearly 70 million AI crawler visits in a single month. They controlled for variables and pulled out the patterns.
This is the baseline our industry has been waiting for. Anecdotes shape opinions. Data shapes strategy. Both episodes of my conversation with Shawn are live on the AI SEO Insighter Podcast.
The One Number Every Agency Owner Should Memorize
Here is the finding I want you to write down.
AI-crawled sites generate 3.2 times more human traffic than sites the AI engines ignore. They pull 2.7 times more form submissions. They drive 2.5 times more click-to-call events, which is the metric that matters most for any local service business.
Form submissions and click-to-call events are not soft metrics. They map directly to closed business. A 2.7x lift in submissions is the difference between a busy month and a slow one. AI visibility is no longer a vanity metric. It is a revenue conversation.
Google Business Profile Sync Is the Most Underused AEO Lever on the Planet
This finding stopped me in my tracks.
Sites with Google Business Profile Sync enabled achieved a 92.8% AI crawl rate. Almost every single one of them is getting visited by the AI engines.
Only 0.4% of sites in the study have it implemented. Less than half of one percent. A feature is sitting right there, free in most cases, that almost guarantees AI crawler visibility, and 99.6% of local businesses are ignoring it.
I’ve been doing SEO since the late 90s. I have rarely seen a gap this wide between effort and outcome. Most owners I talk to assume their GBP is already syncing. It is not. Sync is a discrete feature on platforms like Duda, and on most CMSs, it has to be configured deliberately. The setup takes minutes. The impact compounds for years.
If you do nothing else this week, audit your GBP Sync status today. If you build sites for clients, audit every single client site this week.
Feature Stacking and Why One Optimization Is Never Enough
Sites with four or more active AEO optimizations achieve a 95.9% AI crawl rate. They also pulled 16 times the average crawler visits across the entire study.
This is compounding behavior, not additive. The math is non-linear. The implication for agency owners is simple. You cannot pitch this work as “we’ll turn on your GBP Sync and call it AEO.” You have to think about a stack working together. Schema markup. Structured FAQ data. Cleaner internal linking. Citation-friendly content. Author bios with real bylines. All of it in concert.
Each optimization is a deliverable. Four is a meaningful stack. Six or eight is a competitive moat.
Who Is Actually Doing All the Crawling
OpenAI alone accounts for 81% of all AI crawler traffic. Not 51%. Eighty-one percent. Any AEO strategy that does not account for that reality is missing the forest for the trees.
Claude grew significantly year over year, and the curve is steep. Six months from now, the distribution might look different. But right now, OpenAI is the dominant crawler by a massive margin.
What that means in practice is where you should be testing your client visibility. When I run an AEO audit, I check ChatGPT first, then Perplexity, then Claude, then Google’s AI Overview. The volume of crawler traffic should match the volume of testing time you spend on each platform.
Three Things Every Agency Owner Should Be Doing This Week
First, audit the client GBP Sync status. Every client. Every site. Turn it on where it is missing.
Second, layer additional optimizations on top. Pick three more features and ship them. Schema markup, structured FAQ content, citation-friendly authoritative content. Get to four total active features per site as fast as you can.
Third, start monitoring AI crawler behavior on your own and client sites. You cannot optimize what you cannot measure. This is about to become a baseline competency, the same way Google Search Console fluency became baseline a decade ago.
The Free Summit Where You Can Hear More
The team at Duda asked me to share this with you because it ties directly to everything I just covered.
On May 27, 2026, from 9 am to 1 pm Pacific Time, Duda is hosting Growth Embedded. It is a free virtual vertical SaaS summit on AI monetization, agentic workflows, and AI visibility for small businesses.
The session you do not want to miss is the last one, noon to 1 p.m. Pacific. Russ Jeffery, Director of Platform Strategy at Duda, is hosting a deep dive on the exact 858,000-website study Shawn and I unpacked. He is bringing in AJ Oberlender, Director of Customer Websites at DoorLoop, Patrick Briggs from Semmify, and Matt Coghlan from Uberall to translate what those numbers mean for SMBs and the platforms that serve them.
If you are an agency owner, a SaaS founder serving small businesses, or you build websites for local businesses for a living, these four hours will pay you back many times over. It is free. Block your calendar.
What to Do Next
Watch part one and part two of the AI SEO Insighter Podcast. Part one lays the foundation. Part two covers the practical features and action items.
Then sign up for the Duda Growth Embedded Summit on May 27.
If you are already running AEO experiments on your own sites or client sites, send me a note. I would love to compare data.
Stay safe and healthy.
Cheers,
Chris