LLM traffic: What’s actually happening and what to do about it
Learnings from Sentry's data and why web discoverability as a whole shifted our strategy.
Key Takeaways:
Brand matters a lot when it comes to overall discoverability, so focus is shifting to methods that drive brand awareness growth.
At Sentry, LLM traffic has a 6x higher website signup conversion rate, but 5x worse conversion rate to paying customers – signaling a gap between interest and intent.
Pivoting to tracking LLM visibility, structuring content for LLM digestibility, changing content approaches, and thinking about the future of conversion can help prepare you for the weirdness coming in the next few years.
SEO jobs are shifting to encompass the distribution of content. They now focus more broadly on the discoverability of a website.
AEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO 😵💫.
When ChatGPT became a legit referral source of traffic and revenue to websites, everyone rushed to coin the next SEO term. There was only one problem, nobody knew how to actually influence the LLMs to rank their brand in their citations and mentions.
We all had the old status quo figured out; we learned the Google rites (the true sickos even studied Bing 🤪). Then traffic cratered, the “content is king” era ended, and even though Google says everything is fine, the boots on the ground Growth teams are left to short circuit. In this post, i’ll walk through what happened at Sentry and how we’re adjusting. Then I'll share why I think we all should start focusing on content discoverability and less on trying to find a buzzy phrase.
What's happening with LLM traffic at Sentry
What's actually happening to Sentry with SEO and LLM referral traffic is pretty interesting:
We in-housed discoverability expertise instead of keeping it outsourced so that our team is closer to the content and brand.
LLM traffic as a referral source is only about 10% that of Google for Sentry at least (impressive bite by ChatGPT into the market share of a monopoly in-process of being broken up).
ChatGPT is driving the majority of traffic (Perplexity, Claude, others behind that)
LLM signups on Sentry’s website convert 6x better than Google Search, but conversions to to paid customers are ~5x worse.
You might think 10% of Google is a small enough number not worthy of your focus, or that SEO tactics will get you by, but I would argue that shifting to a discoverability mindset cannot be ignored. Here's why:
Despite ChatGPT traffic only accounting for 10% of the volume of Google, in our “how did you hear about us” survey that we serve to fresh signups, we've learned that AI chat is now the #1 way people find out about Sentry. Beyond word of mouth, beyond ads, beyond Google.
So then why aren't they converting to paying customers like organic search? A conversation with an LLM should behave like a friend telling you about a solution to your problem, right? And why don’t we see the traffic numbers match the survey results?
I don't have the answer yet. This is the next big question to solve.
Are people just tinkering that come from ChatGPT?
Because we don't have cookies on our website are these last touch ChatGPT visits not telling the whole story? (spoiler: probably)
Are LLMs overstating what our product is?
Are there new lower-intent audiences finding us that weren't before?
As a community solves some of this, I'd love to share learnings as we move forward into the weirdness. Despite the open questions, we’re making a lot of adjustments.
Here is what we are doing to adjust to the new wave of discoverability
We are measuring our visibility score in LLMs on core topics that we deem key to our success. Currently our tool of choice is Profound, but Ahrefs and Semrush are quickly moving to provide comparable offerings
We are updating the websites to be easier digested for LLMs. The majority of internet traffic is now bots. You write for humans, but you add structure to easily be digested by LLMs. Our docs team created MDX versions of every docs page to allow the LLMs to help set up Sentry for software engineers prompting them.
We are ensuring our content that we consider crucial to be updated frequently and adding schema to show “updated date” in all of our blogs. Freshness of content is crucial right now.
Others have used llms.txt to attempt to direct LLMs to easily understand their website. We are playing the wait and see approach with if this becomes a standard but I'm on the side of “it can't hurt.” Some companies like Windsurf have mentioned that llms.txt saves tokens and agent time. We’ll see.
We have dramatically altered our content strategy away from producing content that can easily be gobbled up by AIOs without citation. For example, we were working on a library of technical solutions called Sentry Answers which gave longer-form human written answers instead of a StackOverflow (which often left people frustrated when they couldn't get clarity). We also were writing Top of Funnel content occasionally and quickly switched to doubling down on how-tos, solutions pages, and in-depth tutorials. With Google’s AI mode, You get ~5x fewer clicks to your site, so content like this will only be more critical.
We launched one of the first MCP servers so that devs can utilize Sentry from Claude, Cursor, etc. No this wasn't part of our strategy for AI referral traffic, but I mention this because it signals a shift to a new way people want to interact with the web. Maybe in the near future your signup flow on your website won't be on your website, it will happen in a chat with AI.
SEO jobs are now discoverability jobs.
As you can tell by now, I believe the work to get your brand discovered for the topics you care about is an expanded scope vs. traditional SEO roles. My mildly spicy take is this: SEOs are now discoverability professionals. Google isn't the sole focus of your time and effort.
This was already becoming true with social media ranking in Google (like Tiktoks indexing in Google), but when Google retooled search results to favor Reddit threads, this basically cemented the fact that multiple platforms are required for brand discoverability. LLMs are just the next surface to adapt to.
Branded searches is now the leading factor for citations and rank in AI Chat and influencing branded searches is an awareness game. It's not just a content marketing game, it's how you distribute that content via social, Reddit, forums, newsletters, publishers, thought leaders, videos, RSS feeds, etc.
This is a skillset SEOs used to hand off to their channel owner counterparts (like digital, social, community, and demand-gen teams) to distribute but now we must have a hand in the distribution strategy. I'm biased because SEO and paid media live under Growth at Sentry, but I've found this structure to be effective. Less squabbling for which team drove revenue attribution and more shared outcomes of the content that gets produced.
We’re all playing a different game now, and its rules have been shifting on a weekly basis—not just when Google launches an algo update. The ambiguity is for sure a bit unsettling, but it’s also exciting. SEO was always about discoverability, but now instead of waiting for the bread crumbs Google wipes off the table, we have new forces and spheres of influence that we can all work together to harness.
Nice piece Matt!