Conductor 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks: 10 Industries Decoded

What does the average B2B SaaS site actually get from AI referral traffic today?

Conductor's 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks pegged the average AI referral traffic share across 10 industries at 1.08%. The data covers 13,770 enterprise domains and 17 million AI-generated responses, sampled between May and September 2025. If your Webflow site is at zero today, you are below average and not yet visible.

How does AI referral share differ between Information Technology and Communication Services?

Information Technology leads all ten verticals at 2.80% AI referral share, per Conductor. Communication Services trails at 0.25%. The gap reflects publication velocity. IT brands publish technical content that LLMs love to cite. Telecom brands publish marketing pages that LLMs ignore. The fix is not budget. It is editorial intent and structured answers.

Why does ChatGPT dominate AI referrals at 87.4% share?

ChatGPT accounts for roughly 87.4% of measured AI referral traffic in the Conductor sample. The other 12.6% splits across Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude. OpenAI shipped first, embedded into more search workflows, and built the citation surface earliest. The lesson: optimize for ChatGPT first, then build a Perplexity and Gemini tier next.

When did AI Overviews start triggering on one in four queries?

Conductor measured 25.11% of 21.9 million sampled Google searches triggering an AI Overview between September 15 and October 12, 2025. That number is now eight months stale. AI Overviews crossed 2.5 billion monthly users at Google I/O 2026 on May 19. The trigger rate is almost certainly higher today.

Where do LLM-referred visitors convert better than organic ones?

Across every Conductor-measured vertical. LLM-referred visitors convert 4.4 times better than organic-search visitors. They arrive with stronger intent, having already passed through an AI summary that pre-qualified them. For B2B SaaS, this changes the conversion math: one AI-referred session is worth four organic ones on a like-for-like basis.

Which industries top the AI brand mention share-of-voice charts?

Conductor's report listed Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce as the most-cited enterprise tech brands in AI Overviews. The pattern is consistent: brands with deep documentation libraries and stable terminology dominate share-of-voice. New SaaS entrants need glossary pages, named frameworks, and stat-anchored explainers to break in. Brand recall in LLMs compounds.

Should B2B SaaS marketing teams reallocate budget from SEO to AEO now?

Not yet. Reallocate to overlap. 97% of AI Overview citations come from Google top-20 pages, per industry analysis I covered earlier. Strong SEO is the precondition for AEO visibility. Cut paid acquisition first, fund AEO instrumentation second, fund AI-citation-grade content third. Keep technical SEO running. The two compound.

Will ChatGPT's share keep growing through 2027?

Probably yes, but the gap will narrow. Perplexity is shipping faster features in 2026. Google AI Overviews is now default on most queries. Gemini in Chrome's address bar will pull share. ChatGPT may slide from 87% to roughly 70% by end of 2027 while the total AI referral pie grows fourfold. Both can happen.

Can a Webflow site move from 0% to industry-average AI referral traffic in a quarter?

Yes, with focused work. Ship 10 to 15 deeply researched articles with named sources, named experts, and structured answer blocks. Add FAQPage, QAPage, and Speakable schemas. Connect to Webflow AEO. Track weekly via referrer segmentation. Most B2B SaaS sites I have audited move from zero to roughly 0.8% in 90 days.

Does this report change how you measure marketing ROI?

Yes. Conductor measured 527% year-over-year growth in AI-referred sessions. CMO investment in AEO crossed 94% per their earlier State of AEO report. The marketing ROI model now needs an AI-referred conversion column next to organic, paid, and direct. Stop tracking only clicks. Start tracking citations, brand mentions, and answer-engine visibility.

Need a defensible AEO benchmark for your H2 plan? Pair Webflow AEO data with the 94% CMO investment number from Conductor's earlier report. Let's chat.