A year of ChatGPT traffic, measured on our own store

Almost everything published about visibility in AI assistants is written by somebody selling visibility in AI assistants, using somebody else’s numbers. These are ours. eolasprints.com is the store of Eolas Prints, the factory we came out of: we built it, we run it and we pay its bills, so we can open the analytics and show what is there.

The figures

Referred sessions by named source, for the twelve months to 27 August 2026. “Named” means Shopify could identify where the visit came from: most of any store’s traffic arrives as direct and cannot be attributed to anyone.

Two things at once. ChatGPT now sends more people to the store than DuckDuckGo, and twenty times more than Perplexity. And ChatGPT is 2.7% of Google’s volume. Both are true, and anyone telling you only one of them is selling you something.

How it grew

By month, starting with the partial month in which the first attributable traffic appears: 16, 101, 151, 165, 152, 158, 127, 132, 145, 195, 181, 198 and 212. It climbed quickly at first, went flat around 150 through the winter, and has been rising again since May.

That flat stretch is the useful part of the chart. This is not a curve that takes off: it is a new channel settling, then growing again. If somebody shows you only the first quarter, they are showing you the start of any new channel.

A channel that is not big yet can still be the one growing fastest. Those are two separate measurements, and both are worth looking at.

What these figures do not say

They are sessions, not orders. We publish the traffic because traffic is what answers “is this sending me anybody?”, and we do not publish the store’s revenue because that is the company’s commercial information. If somebody shows you AI referral traffic and lets you infer it means sales, look carefully at what they actually showed you.

They also do not say why. The analytics say the visit came from ChatGPT; they do not say what that person asked or what the assistant answered. Anyone offering you that part with confidence is inventing it.

What we did

Nothing exotic, and nothing that depends on a trick. An assistant cites what it can read, understand and attribute to a specific entity, so the work is making those three things easy:

• Correct, complete structured data on product, organisation and availability — not a fragment of schema bolted on top.
• An llms.txt that says what the company is, what it sells and where to go, in plain text with no marketing.
• Entity pages: a page that defines who you are, linking to the sites that confirm you exist.
• Content restructured so each answer is complete inside its own paragraph rather than spread across the page.
• Prices and facts in the HTML, not behind JavaScript a crawler does not run.

It is the same work we did on this site, and that is why this note exists: if we could not show the analytics from a store of our own, this would be another page of theory.

What we cannot promise you

That ChatGPT will recommend you. Nobody can, and anyone who guarantees it either does not know how it works or is counting on you not knowing. What can be done is measuring where you are mentioned today, working on the part that depends on you, and showing you the before and after with the numbers in front of you.