On-page factors for AI visibility

As LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini become go-to search tools, website owners need to understand what makes sites visible to AI, and by extension, their target audience.

To be clear, there are many factors that play into generative engine optimization, like digital PR, your social media channels, and your presence on Wikipedia and forums like Reddit. But since you have the most control over your own website, we wanted to see which on-page factors contribute most to visibility in AI search.

The question

Which on-page SEO factors make websites more visible to LLMs?

The research

We analyzed Wix sites between January 2024 and September 2025. We tracked queries (when an LLM visited a site to answer a user’s question) and sessions (site visits that came from AI platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and DeepAI).

Queries:

Sessions:

From there, we wanted to learn which on-site factors drove AI visibility and traffic. We used the Random Forest model—a well-known machine learning method that cuts through complex data to reveal which signals matter most—to determine the site features with the highest impact.

The site qualities we compared: 

Site content characteristics

• Blog post count

• List count

• Images with alt text

• Character count

• Page size

• Internal links

• Total links

• Response time

• Paragraph count

• Total images

• Meta description length

• Heading count

• Word count

Site traffic characteristics

• Organic

• Direct

• Social

• Email marketing

• Referrals (broken down by platforms like LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Quora, and Reddit)

The findings

How much traffic AI is driving

AI accounted for only 0.083% of total sessions as of September 2025. Most site traffic still came from traditional search, which accounted for 34.36% of total site traffic the same month.

Among LLMs, ChatGPT was by far the biggest driver of site traffic: ChatGPT accounted for 88% of AI site traffic in September 2025, followed by Perplexity at 6.7% and Gemini at 3.5%.

Still, as you can see above, this represents 168x growth from January 2024 to September 2025, with a rapid rise beginning late 2024. You can understand how your specific sites are performing in AI search with Wix's AI Visibility Overview.

The types of sites that were most successful in AI search

Organic search traffic was the strongest predictor of AI visibility: sites with 50+ organic search visits per month were 8.2x more likely to be discovered than sites with minimal or no organic search traffic. LLMs discover nearly all sites (95%+) once traffic exceeds 100 monthly sessions. 

There’s correlation between good SEO hygiene (longer titles, meta descriptions, and completed SEO tasks) and greater AI visibility.

Compared to other Wix websites, high AI performers had…

• 60% longer meta descriptions

• 57% longer meta titles 

• 7% higher Wix SEO Setup Checklist completion rates 

But traffic volume alone doesn’t explain visibility in AI search. Many smaller sites surfaced, while some larger sites were excluded. The sites that surfaced had a few things in common:

• Referral traffic from professional networks (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, etc.), content discovery hubs (Reddit, Hacker News), and multimedia platforms (YouTube, TikTok) correlated with higher AI presence. 

  
  

  For example, a single visit in a month from Notion increased AI discovery rates by 28%. Medium presence increased visibility by 25%, Pinterest by 29%, Quora by 22%, Wikipedia by 19%, Reddit by 13%, LinkedIn by 12%, and YouTube by 11%.

• Smaller sites with high AI visibility optimized their content in the following ways:

• They used 1.6x more images with alt text 

• Their pages contained 1.5x more text

• They used 1.4x more structured formatting (lists, sections)

• They had 2x stronger internal linking

• They published more blog posts per month: sites that published 2+ posts a month saw 1.1x higher AI visibility; those that published 6+ had 1.3x higher visibility compared to sites with no posts.  

• Authority is crucial. Sites that had low organic traffic but high AI traffic were niche sites with expertise in a certain domain, like skin conditions, music, or a specific travel destination. 

Your on-site optimization checklist for AI search

There are many ways to optimize Wix & Wix Studio sites for AI search. External factors, like referral traffic, require a broader web presence and breaking down team silos, both of which are important. But our research also finds that there are on-page optimizations you can control and implement immediately. Start here:

The takeaways

AI prioritizes sites that are authoritative, well-structured, and actively maintained. Sites with search authority, credible referrals, consistent publishing, and strong metadata are far more likely to appear in AI-generated answers. 

And while AI site traffic is small, the same factors that contribute to organic search success also improve your visibility in AI search. 

Like we mentioned above, there are indeed other aspects to a well-rounded GEO strategy—digital PR, forums, social media presence, for example—but solid SEO is fundamental to search success across platforms. If you haven’t already invested in basic SEO, start there. Then, continuously monitor site performance.