Help please! Citation counts going up while actual referral traffic/trials go down?
Running GEO tracking for a B2B SaaS product and hitting something that doesn't add up. the citation volume across AI answers (tracked via a GEO monitoring tool) has been rising all year, but actual referral traffic and conversions coming from ChatGPT specifically have dropped sharply since mid-June — down roughly 75%. The drop is concentrated almost entirely on the homepage; other pages (blog, feature pages) have held flat.
We've ruled out a few things on our end — no page removals, no obvious competitor ramp-up we can find, and it's not being cannibalised by a paid ChatGPT ads(the organic decline started weeks earlier).
Left with two working theories:
- Some platform-level change in how ChatGPT surfaces/links citations for broader queries
- We're getting displaced from the "recommended" pick by a competitor while still technically showing up in the answer set — being named but not chosen- Trying to figure how to compare this only for the homepage- no luck yet.
Has anyone else seen this pattern — citation counts going up while actual referral traffic/clicks go down? Curious whether this is a wider ChatGPT-side shift right now or something isolated. Any diagnostic approaches for telling those two apart would be genuinely useful.