AI search results are gaining a major foothold in how people find and consume information.
Instead of scrolling through the first page of Google, many answers can be found in the AI-generated overview section at the top of the page.
Therefore, SEO traffic isn’t what it used to be.
And if you’ve noticed your organic visits falling off a cliff recently, you're not alone.
📉 HubSpot’s blog traffic dropped 80%.
📉 Ahrefs found that AI Overviews cut click-throughs by 34.5% for first-page rankings.
But before you panic, there’s a silver lining and a strategy to take advantage of it right here.
Your Traffic Is Getting Smaller — But More of The Visitors You Do Have Are Buyers
Less traffic doesn’t mean less opportunity.
In fact, it means more opportunity — because what’s left is more higher intent visitors.
More of the visitors who do click through to your site aren’t casually browsing anymore. They’re deeper in their journey.
They might have already asked their initial questions. They’ve seen the AI search results and are ready to do a deeper dive. They’re shortlisting solutions.
So when they do land on your website, they’re likely to be higher intent.
Lift AI’s latest research shows high-intent visitors are now 10.2% of total website traffic — up from 9.8% two years ago. That’s a minor, but meaningful bump. What’s more interesting is the huge jump in medium intent visitors - from 17% to 28.8%. Together with high intent visitors, that’s ~40% of your traffic that could be converted with the right tactics (up from 27% combined).
That also puts low intent traffic at 61%, down from a huge 74%. That’s across B2B and B2C websites in nearly every industry.
That means 1 in 10 of your visitors are sales-ready right now, and 3 in 10 could be converted quickly with the right steps.
And if you’re not ready to meet them with the right message, the right engagement, and the right conversion trigger right there in the moment — they’re gone.
So even though having strong SEO is important (to increase the likelihood you show up in AI overviews), the focus now more than ever should be converting the high and mid intent visitors you already have.
Traditional Conversion Tactics Aren’t Working
The average website conversion rate in 2025 is about 3%.
That means 97% of your traffic is departing without converting.
Let’s talk about how you’re probably trying to convert traffic today and why that may not be working:
- You use tools like chat, but ask for an email address upfront (which results in 80% of visitors bouncing)
- You rely on pageviews like pricing pages to signal buyer intent (but 88% of real buyers never even visit your pricing page)
- Or, you try and target buyers across every page which results in a one-size-fits-all experience and ends up flooding the sales team with non-buyers (for chat), interrupting the visitor experience (for pop-ups) or not resonating with the visitor’s intent (content personalization)
- *For B2B websites* You might also assume ID-reveal tools will identify the visitor’s account or contact (they won’t — up to 70% of visitors remain anonymous, plus ID revealing an account doesn’t magically mean they’re in buying mode)
If you want to win in 2025, you need a new approach.
Micro Behavior Is the New Gold Standard for Buyer Intent
So if none of these tactics are working well, what’s the solution?
You need to understand the buying intent of every single website visitor in real-time, then treat them with a conversion experience aligned to that intent.
And the strongest signal of buyer readiness is nuanced website behavior.
Like an experienced salesperson who understands the small behaviors that separate a browser from a buyer. But at scale.
That’s where Lift AI comes in.
Using a machine-learning model trained on billions of data points and hundreds of millions of sales, Lift AI scores every visitor’s intent in real-time based on their “micro behaviors” on your website — even if the visitor is completely anonymous.
Then it feeds those intent scores into your existing tools — Drift, HubSpot, Intercom, Marketo, Salesloft, 6Sense, and many more — so you can take action while that buyer is still on your site (or retarget them after leaving).
The Results — Real Brands, Real Revenue
Let’s make this tangible. Here’s what happens when companies focus on high-intent traffic spotted by Lift AI:
Truckstop:
- 3.8x ROI and $55k in new ARR month one
- 27x ROI and $286k in new ARR by month five
- 9.72% conversion rate for high-intent traffic vs. 3.28% sitewide average.
Payscale:
- 54% of total pipeline from anonymous visitors (and 12x the pipeline they contracted Lift AI for)
- 9x increase in sales efficiency after shifting from pricing-page targeting to Lift AI intent scoring
Chronus:
- 85% of pipeline came from anonymous traffic that ABM tools couldn’t even see.
- 11.6x increase in sales efficiency by layering Lift AI into their 6Sense workflows.
And that’s just a sample of many more results and case studies you can find right here.
The Future Belongs to the Smart & Fast
The days of spray-and-pray content, passive traffic, and gated ebook PDFs are numbered.
AI search is changing everything. Fast.
That’s the bad news.
The good news?
Your website is about to become your most powerful, high-ROI sales channel — if you’re smart about how you find and treat high intent visitors while they’re live on your website.
Because remember, on average 10.2% of them are. Right now. And 28.5% of them are medium intent, ready to advance when given the right experience.
So you need to make those visits count.
Want to see exactly which visitors on your site are ready to convert today?
Get your free 30-day Lift AI trial (for qualified accounts only)
