Our company, B&Company, mainly supports businesses in Vietnam, so it may not be appropriate for us to talk about AI. However, we thought this article might be useful given the current situation, so we decided to publish it. Please forgive us for the different style of articles from our usual articles.

B&Company website overview

B&Company acts as a bridge between Vietnam-Japan and other countries, providing business support for expansion. For this reason, we have been working to enrich our economic articles related to Vietnam.

Although our website is a Japanese domain ending in “.jp,” the server is located in Vietnam, and it has been disseminating the same content in three languages: Japanese, English, and Vietnamese using machine translation (Chinese and Korean were added one month ago).

As a result, the majority of visitors are from within Vietnam, followed by Japan, and the remaining 20% are from around the world. The impact of AI discussed here reflects global trends, and it is highly likely that Vietnam is ahead of Japan.

Google vs. AI

The latest access analysis shows a notable increase in AI visits.

The graph below shows the sources of traffic to our website over the past month (excluding advertisements, which are almost nonexistent).

B&Company users by source in the last 30 days (March 29 – April 27)

Unit: %

Google was the most popular, accounting for about 60%. As a result of a Google search, we can see that most of the visitors came to our site because our articles were picked up. Thankfully, direct traffic came in second, accounting for about 15%. On the other hand, what surprised us was that ChatGPT came in third, and three of the top seven were AI-related (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini). Our marketing department discovered this trend a few months ago and has been paying attention to it ever since.

Why is AI traffic increasing?

There are two possible routes for an AI visit.

1. Pre-learning by AI

The information seeker (a human at the end) sees the answer that the AI generates using the results of its pre-learning. For example, if our company has posted an article about the education industry in Vietnam, the AI has ” read” that article in advance. When the information seeker asks a question such as “Tell me about the extracurricular activities in Vietnam,” the AI combines it with other information to generate an answer.

2. Real-time search by AI for each question

For example, when searching about the current situation regarding extracurricular activities in Vietnam, the AI performs an internet search and generates an answer by combining this with its pre-existing knowledge.

As for which is more common, it’s probably number 1. Of course, there are cases where number 1 and number 2 are used together to generate an answer.

However, the problem here is that in either case, the person asking the question will probably not go out of their way to click and visit our website.

Zero click phenomenon that is currently making waves in the world – simply looking at the search results and not visiting individual sites.

As an exception, if you search for a market research company in Vietnam, there may still be cases where people click and visit our company. This is because they want to know about “companies”. Overall, it would not be surprising if “only AI remains ” as the main visitor to our company.

Growth stopped 3 months ago

The following graph shows the time series.

Percentage of B&Company users in the last 8 months (by source)

Unit: %

Looking at the past eight months, the proportion of visitors from AI began to increase from fall to winter last year and then rose sharply in January this year. If it continued like this, AI would have surpassed traditional search in one or two years.

On the other hand, the pace has slowed since January. Both graphs have remained flat up to the present.

The reason is unclear, but it may be related to the fact that Google has started displaying “AI summaries” in its international search since the middle of last year. The majority of people who have not yet used AI can now benefit from it simply by continuing to use Google search.

If so, does that mean the trend toward AI has stopped? Even if it is under the name of Google, if it becomes “zero click”, where you just see the “AI summary” and don’t click, it will be the same as a shift to AI. If you think about it that way, the shift from search to AI is an inevitable trend, regardless of the exact timing.

Conclusion

We write this article quickly in response to the NEWSPIKS article below.

https://newspicks.com/news/14118689/body/

Any company can easily perform a website traffic analysis. However, there isn’t much information about a specific company that is publicly available, so I thought that if I released it now, some people might find it interesting.

I foolishly thought that this would ultimately lead to an increase in traffic to our website.