Traffic from AI assistants to U.S. retail sites grew 4,700% last year.

Hey y’all,

I worked from the Google office in Paris last week. A friend brought me in as her guest and I genuinely forgot what it feels like to be around other people building things all day. I love working from home, but there’s something about being surrounded by folks experimenting, shipping, breaking stuff, fixing it, and workshopping ideas in real time.

Also, the rooftop doesn’t hurt:

Okay. Onto today’s letter.

I’ve written before about the “dark traffic” from AI — all the demand that’s hitting (or skipping) your site via assistants you don’t see in your standard reports. Most people tell me, “Yeah, we know this is coming,” and then go right back to wrestling the same Google and Meta dashboards they’ve been staring at since 2018.

So today, I want to do something a bit different.

I’m not going to going to write a letter about why I think AI search is important. I’m going to hand you hard numbers from Deloitte and show you how to turn them into a business case you can put in front of your CEO, CMO, CDO, or CFO without feeling like you’re pitching a science project.​