As traditional channels shift and AI begins to influence discovery, marketers are finding power in agility, not authority.
So, AI is now sending more traffic than Reddit. Let that sink in.
According to fresh data from Ahrefs, AI tools like ChatGPT have started to matter in the referral game. ChatGPT alone accounts for over 80 percent of all AI-sourced visits; which, granted, still only adds up to a sliver of total web traffic. Around 0.25 percent, to be exact. Google remains the heavyweight here. No real surprise. But the fact that AI is even on the board is worth paying attention to.
AI Isn’t Playing by the Old Rules
Here’s where it gets more interesting. AI models aren’t citing the usual suspects. You’d think high domain authority would matter, right? Turns out, not so much. The study found that the old-school
signals—backlinks, domain rank, all that—don’t strongly predict whether a site gets mentioned in AI-generated content. Instead, these tools are leaning toward user-generated content and encyclopedic sources. Think Wikipedia, not Wired.
Ahrefs’ follow-up analysis confirms it. Relevance, clarity, and usefulness are starting to edge out legacy authority. And if your content reads like it was written for humans, not crawlers, you’re more likely to show up in AI summaries. That’s a shift worth watching.
The Rise of Scrappy Marketing
Now, parallel to all this AI noise, there’s something else bubbling up: scrappy marketing. You’ve probably noticed it. The clever billboard that wasn’t really a billboard. The podcast that showed up in a Reddit thread, not a paid ad. HubSpot just published a roundup of low-budget, high-ingenuity tactics that are giving big-budget campaigns a run for their money. And honestly, it’s refreshing.
One example that stuck: Drift dropped $1,200 on a billboard; not to drive foot traffic, but to spark chatter online. The thing was basically a meme in physical form. And it worked. Then there’s HubSpot itself, embedding a podcast directly into Reddit conversations. No spend, just smart placement. These aren’t stunts. They’re calculated moves, designed to meet people where they already are.
Resonance Over Reach
This kind of marketing doesn’t need to scale in the traditional sense. It just needs to resonate. And in a landscape where AI might surface your brand not because you’re the biggest, but because you’re the clearest or the most helpful, that resonance matters more than ever.
Scrappy doesn’t mean amateur. It means fast. It means responsive. It means knowing what your audience actually cares about, and then building with that in mind. You don’t need a war chest. You need timing, taste, and a little nerve.
Authenticity Is the New Authority
And here’s the kicker: AI seems to reward that same kind of authenticity. If a chatbot is pulling from Reddit threads and wiki pages, then the polished, keyword-stuffed content sitting on your blog might not be doing you any favors. Clarity wins. So does relevance. So does actually being useful.
If you’re hiring, by the way, HubSpot also dropped a 2025 guide to building a marketing team. Worth skimming if you’re trying to figure out what kind of talent fits this new, messier landscape.
And while you’re at it, take a look at their updated list of AI video tools. Because yes, video’s still king. But how you make it, and how fast you can turn it around, might matter more than how much you spend.
Between Authority and Agility
So where does that leave us? Somewhere between Google’s old guard and AI’s new logic. Between the billboard that nobody saw and the Reddit thread that quietly moved the needle. Between authority and agility.
You’re not just adjusting to new channels. You’re learning how discovery actually works now.
And if you ask me, that’s not such a bad place to be.
That’s it for today, folks.
Catch you in the next post.
Until then, keep building.
– Perfect Sites Blog