AI referrals are 1.5% of sessions — a small but growing channel, roughly flat vs prior 30-day window (0.2pp). Meanwhile AI platforms crawled 6 desks more heavily than the traffic they returned. The consumption footprint is far larger than the referral stream suggests.

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Infrastructure

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Bot Policy & cost control

Which crawlers to block, rate-limit, or allow. First-party evidence driving real CDN-bill savings.

Outcome-tracked commissions

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This week’s commissions

Write-new, refresh, and retire decisions ranked by recovered revenue — citations, affiliate conversion, or newsletter LTV.

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Pricing Intelligence

What your content is worth on an open rate card — useful with or without a marketplace deal.

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Reconciliation

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01 / CONSUMPTION

Total AI crawls this week

Top consuming platform

0↑ 74% of catalog (500 URLs)

See yield gap→

Traffic context

AI referrals are 1–2% of sessions. These numbers are real but thin — the consumption story above is where the leverage is.

AI SHARE

AI share of sessions

0.0%→ +0.2pp vs prior 30d

See channel mix→

|Industry median: 1.5% (top quartile: 3.2%)

SUB LIFT

AI subscription lift vs search

0.00×↑ +0.52× vs prior 30d

See funnel→

YIELD GAP

Sections with inventory leaking

0↑ +1 vs prior 30d

See leaks→

01Traffic exposure

Of the visitors who did return, where did they come from?

Daily sessions by channel

stacked · 30d

Click any point on the chart to add a note.

Channel share

Channel	Share	WoW	Trend
Search	51.7%	↓ 0.2
AI

02Revenue funnel

The small slice that came back — do they convert?

AI-REFERRED

AI channel

End-to-end

0.35%

Visits17.2K—

Registrations2661.55%

Subscriptions6122.93%

SEARCH-REFERRED

Search channel

End-to-end

0.10%

Visits620K—

Registrations7.6K1.23%

Subscriptions6308.28%

DIRECT-REFERRED

Direct channel

End-to-end

0.11%

Visits470K—

Registrations3.5K0.75%

Subscriptions54015.32%

The headline

AI-referred users register at 1.55% versus 1.23% for search (1.26× higher). The AI-referred population is small (17.2Ksessions) — sample-size caveats apply, but the rate is worth tracking as volume grows.

Industry: AI converts 5x vs search (up to 23x at WaPo-level publishers)

Funnel rates by section

Section	AI reg %	Search reg %	Reg lift	AI sub %	Sub lift
Politics	1.98%	1.34%	1.48×	0.45%	2.37×
Business	1.76%	1.21%	1.45×

03Inventory yield

Crawls in, sessions out — where the gap is widest.

Industry: 60% of AI interactions produce zero clicks (Adobe 2026)

Crawls vs. AI-referred sessions, per desk-week

below line = under-yielding

PoliticsBusinessTechSportsCultureScience

Per-section yield gap (30-day)

Section

Science	752.7K	77.5K	9.72×
Politics	2.7M	365K	7.36×
Business	2M	375.8K	5.22×
Tech	1.8M	423.2K	4.35×
Culture	1.1M	333.4K	3.24×
Sports	1.3M	551.2K	2.39×