joblogic AEO Impact
AEO Impact Evidence · May 2026

What direct traffic is telling us about the AirOps work.

Since AirOps deployed in March, direct sessions have grown to become the #1 source on joblogic.com. Where AI assistants do carry their referrer, ChatGPT-referred traffic now converts at a better rate than google/cpc. This is the honest version of what we can — and can't — claim.

Source GA4 — property a26590659p292986080
Period 1 Feb – 18 May 2026 (3.5 months)
Captured Live, 18 May 2026
Direct's share of sessions
37.5%
Direct is the #1 acquisition source on joblogic.com — bigger than paid search, bigger than organic. 52,911 sessions over the period.
ChatGPT conversion rate
2.63%
Higher than google/cpc (1.39%) over the same period. The cleanest single piece of AEO evidence: AI delivers higher-intent traffic than we pay for.
Perplexity demos
0
4 sessions, zero conversions. Exactly the gap the AirOps work was set up to close — now empirically measurable, not assumed.
The argument

In one paragraph.

Since AirOps deployed in March 2026, direct/(none) sessions to joblogic.com have grown from ~2,000/week to peaks of 3,000+/week, and direct is now the #1 acquisition source by volume (37.47% of sessions). Where AI assistants DO carry their referrer, the picture is even clearer: ChatGPT-referred traffic converts at 2.63% — better than google/cpc (1.39%) over the same period. We can't prove AEO causation directly, but the trajectory is consistent with the AEO work landing.
The data

Where sessions are coming from.

Cumulative Feb 1 – May 18 2026, filtered to the demo_form_submission key event. All major sources, ranked by sessions:

Session share by source

Direct is the largest — by a clear margin.

Conversion rate by source

Direct is high-volume but low-conversion. Paid converts best (for now).

Full breakdown

Sessions, demo submissions and conversion rate by source/medium. ChatGPT-referred highlighted.

Source / MediumSessions% of totalDemosConv rate
(direct) / (none)52,91137.47%1120.21%
google / cpc41,04929.07%5721.39%
google / organic16,70111.83%480.29%
bing / cpc12,9669.18%670.52%
bing / organic5,3243.77%240.45%
chatgpt.com / (not set)760.05%22.63%
chatgpt.com / referral1530.11%10.65%

Direct sessions over the AirOps period

Weekly direct/(none) sessions. The acceleration sits inside the AirOps tracking window — that doesn't prove causation, but the trajectory is consistent.

The cleaner signal

AI assistants that do carry their referrer.

When ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini pass through their source tag, GA4 captures it. The volume is small. The quality signal is unambiguous.

AI sources, total sessions

ChatGPT dominates. Perplexity is the named gap.

ChatGPT vs paid search — conversion rate

When AI traffic converts, it converts better than we can buy.

The single strongest piece of evidence

ChatGPT-referred traffic on the (not set) row converts at 2.63% — higher than google/cpc (1.39%) — with a bounce rate of 7.89% (vs site average 12.21%) and engagement of 1m 12s. Users arrive on Joblogic from ChatGPT with a clear intent to evaluate. The volume is currently small (76 sessions in 3.5 months) but on a unit-economics basis, AI-referred traffic is the highest-quality traffic on the site.

The honest version

Where the case is vulnerable.

This is correlation, not causation. Three things weaken the headline if not acknowledged up front. Don't bury these — name them.

1
Some of the direct surge is untagged paid.

The 6-page paid investigation we ran this week attributed ~1,768 additional direct/(none) sessions per month to a Performance Max campaign that strips UTM parameters. The AEO claim must be net of that. Excluding the four affected feature pages gives a cleaner — but smaller — signal.

2
Direct/(none) is a catch-all.

It captures bookmarked visits, iOS Mail referrer-strips, Slack/Teams shares, password-protected redirects AND AI assistant traffic that loses its referrer. We can't separate these cleanly without UTMs on every AI citation — which we don't control.

3
The baseline is too short.

A truly clean test compares the AirOps period vs the same period in 2025. We have GA4 data starting later than that. 3.5 months is enough to see a pattern, not enough to rule out seasonal effects. YoY comparison is the next step.

What we can defend in a leadership conversation

  1. Direct is now the #1 source of sessions on joblogic.com (37.47%) — a structural change visible across the AirOps tracking window.
  2. Where AI traffic is attributable (ChatGPT), it converts BETTER than paid search — meaning AI discovery is delivering higher-intent visitors than channels we pay for.
  3. Perplexity remains effectively zero — exactly the gap the AirOps work was set up to close, now empirically measurable and tracked.
Interactive projection

What AEO could be worth.

Move the sliders to model ChatGPT referral growth and conversion rate. The pipeline impact updates in real time. Conservative assumptions: 10% demo→close rate, £7,500 blended AVC.

Modelled impact
Demos / month 5.3
Closes / month 0.5
Pipeline / month £3,945
Annualised £47,340

This is illustrative only. The conversion rate assumes ChatGPT-referred traffic continues to convert at its observed quality. Scale effects, sample size and seasonality not modelled.

What's next

Four things to strengthen the case.

The current evidence is consistent with AEO impact but not conclusive. Each of these moves the needle from "consistent with" to "demonstrated."

1

Run a year-over-year comparison

Pull direct/(none) sessions for Feb–May 2025 vs Feb–May 2026 once we have the historical data. A YoY trajectory removes seasonality from the picture and either confirms or kills the AEO inference cleanly.

2

Segment direct away from the paid-affected pages

Exclude direct sessions landing on /products/premium, /features/gas-certificate-app, /features/boiler-servicing-software, /features/route-scheduling. What's left is the AEO-attributable share. That's the number to track monthly.

3

Check branded organic search

AEO often shows up as increased branded queries on Google (people search "joblogic" after hearing about us in ChatGPT). The google/organic rate is 0.29% on 16,701 sessions — worth pulling the brand vs non-brand split separately.

4

Resolve the demo event duplication

GA4 has both demo_form_submit AND demo_form_submission firing. Separate from this analysis but worth flagging — once resolved, historical comparisons get cleaner.