Catering marketplace: 834 visits from AI assistants and organic up 66%.

Why AI assistant traffic is counted separately

Analytics treats an AI assistant as a referring site. Someone asks ChatGPT a question, the answer carries a link, and the click arrives like any other referral — it shows up under Sources → Sites. That is how we know 834 visits came from six different assistants over 2026, rather than inferring it.

This matters because it is the only honest way to measure generative search today. There is no impressions report for AI answers. What there is, is the click that follows one, and it can be counted.

What happened in classic search

Search visits went from 45,345 in August 2025 to 75,114 in August 2026 — up 66%. Average position in Google moved from 16.4 to 10.2, which is the difference between the bottom of page two and the bottom of page one.

Both numbers are year on year on the same month, because catering demand is seasonal and month-on-month comparisons would flatter the result.

What is not working yet

Form submissions fell: 2,023 in August 2025 against 1,413 in August 2026. More traffic, fewer enquiries. We are not presenting that as a rounding error — it is the open item on this project, and the funnel is being pulled apart by page type and region to find where the drop sits.

Our read so far is a mix shift: the new traffic arrives on informational pages that were not built to convert. That is a content and routing problem rather than a demand problem, but it is unproven until the segment data says so.

Services used on this project: Generative Engine Optimization, SEO, E-commerce growth.

Figures pulled by API from Yandex Metrica, Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console on 26 October 2026. Every number can be opened in its source system on a call.