AI finding
Visits from AI assistants dropped, land on a broken page, or leave at once
AI Warning Severity: Medium
Part of the audit Traffic from AI assistants. Finding id: ai.assistantTraffic.
What it costs you
Visitors an assistant sends you already have a question in mind. A broken landing page or a page that does not answer it loses them at once.
What to do
Repair or redirect landing pages that fail. For pages visitors leave, compare what the assistant says about the page with what the page shows.
What it checks
- Visits from each AI assistant
- Pages AI visitors land on
- How AI visitors engage
How to fix it
Find what changed for this assistant
- Look at the crawler access findings and at robots.txt changes in the same period.
- Check whether the pages [source] used to send visitors to still exist at the same address.
How to check: Compare the sessions again after 28 days.
Make the page answer what the assistant promised
- Ask the assistant the question that leads to [landing url] and read what it promises.
- Put that answer near the top of the page.
How to check: Compare the engaged share again after 28 days.
Repair or redirect the landing page
- If [landing url] answers an error or does not exist: redirect it with a 301 to the page that covers the subject.
How to check: curl -sI [landing url] answers 200 or a 301 to a working page.
A real case
Researchers at Ahrefs checked 16 million URLs cited by six AI assistants and found that the assistants send visitors to 404 pages 2.87 times as often as Google Search.
Thresholds
| Name | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
max_drop_share | 0.3 | Share of an assistant's sessions (0 to 1) that may be lost against the previous 28 days. |
min_sessions | 20 | Sessions needed before a drop (sessions of the previous 28 days) or a low engaged share (sessions of the last 28 days) is reported. Smaller numbers move by chance. |
min_engaged_share | 0.3 | Share of engaged sessions (0 to 1) below which a landing page is reported. |