The prompt-to-visit rate is the share of AI prompts in a category that lead the same person to visit a relevant site within a set time window. It is measured by linking a prompt to a later visit by the same user — a visit that actually happened, and happened after the prompt — then dividing linked visits by prompts over the same period. It is a demand-side, user-behaviour metric, distinct from the crawl-to-refer ratio, which counts a crawler's page fetches per referral and describes bot behaviour.
The defining feature of the rate is that it rises sharply the longer the window. In Gener8's July 2026 AI Landscape report (mobile, US & UK), it climbed roughly 9x to 10x between the 1-hour mark and 72 hours after a prompt, across every vertical measured — evidence that most of a prompt's eventual visits take days, not minutes, to materialise. The rate also varies widely by category (Gener8 put B2B SaaS near 14% and apparel near 3.5% at 24 hours) and by platform (Google AI Mode led ChatGPT and Gemini). Figures are single-vendor and self-reported, so treat them as directional and dated.
The rate matters because it reframes measurement: an AI answer's impact is a curve that builds over days, and the resulting visit usually arrives through branded search or as dark traffic rather than a labelled AI referral. A same-session attribution window will read most of that demand as zero.