On "AI-Recommended Brands Saw 2.5x More Site Visits: Similarweb"

The real story isn't that AI recommendations drive traffic—it's that branded search is doing the heavy lifting, which means the AI layer is mostly just repackaging existing demand instead of creating it. If most of that 2.5x lift flows through branded queries, you're watching conversion of awareness that already existed, not discovery that AI unlocked. For practitioners, this should kill the narrative that AI recommendations are some new traffic engine; they're a polish on top of brands people already know or have heard about elsewhere. The win here is engagement depth, not reach expansion.