Everyone Is Quoting the Same Number and Getting Different Answers.

Now I want to start with a number, actually seven of them, 70,900 to one 38,000 to one.

23,951 to 1.

11,122 to 1.

And it just keeps going down to 10,300 to 4,580.

And finally to 2,237 to 1.

Those are all the same metric for the same company, all attributed to the same source and all published inside about a 13 month window.

Two of them claim the exact same month and they're 17 times apart from each other.

So let me tell you what that metric actually is because if you don't already track this one, none of this means anything yet.

It's called the crawl-to-refer ratio, and the idea is simple enough.

Every AI company runs crawlers that come to your site and fetch pages.

Some of those same platforms will occasionally send you a visitor.

When somebody reads an answer, clicks through to the source underneath it.

You know, the holy grail, what we all want.

The ratio just puts those two things side by side.

How many pages did this platform take versus how many people did it send back? So 5 to 1 means it grabbed 5 pages and returned a visitor.

70,000 to 1 means it grabbed 70,000 pages and returned one visitor.

The reason anybody ever really built this metric is kind of the old deal fell apart.

For 25 plus years, the arrangement was that a search crawler came and took your content and in exchange sent you traffic.

That was Google and Bing and every search engine.

And that trade was the entire economic foundation for putting anything on the open web at all.

AI systems answer the question right there in the interface.

So the taking part kept going and the sending back part mostly stopped.

And this ratio is the cleanest way anyone has found to express how one-sided that has gotten, which is why it spread so fast, why it turned up in board decks, and why it's now driving actual decisions about which crawlers people will let through the door.

And it's not a 2025 story that's kind of settled down.

At its developer conference back in May, Google said AI mode had passed a billion monthly users and that its queries have, in their words, more than doubled every quarter since launch.

Now I want to start with a number, actually seven of them, 70,900 to one 38,000 to one.

23,951 to 1.

11,122 to 1.

And it just keeps going down to 10,300 to 4,580.

And finally to 2,237 to 1.

Those are all the same metric for the same company, all attributed to the same source and all published inside about a 13 month window.

Two of them claim the exact same month and they're 17 times apart from each other.

So let me tell you what that metric actually is because if you don't already track this one, none of this means anything yet.

It's called the crawl-to-refer ratio, and the idea is simple enough.

Every AI company runs crawlers that come to your site and fetch pages.

Some of those same platforms will occasionally send you a visitor.

When somebody reads an answer, clicks through to the source underneath it.

You know, the holy grail, what we all want.

The ratio just puts those two things side by side.

How many pages did this platform take versus how many people did it send back? So 5 to 1 means it grabbed 5 pages and returned a visitor.

70,000 to 1 means it grabbed 70,000 pages and returned one visitor.

The reason anybody ever really built this metric is kind of the old deal fell apart.

For 25 plus years, the arrangement was that a search crawler came and took your content and in exchange sent you traffic.

That was Google and Bing and every search engine.

And that trade was the entire economic foundation for putting anything on the open web at all.

AI systems answer the question right there in the interface.

So the taking part kept going and the sending back part mostly stopped.

And this ratio is the cleanest way anyone has found to express how one-sided that has gotten, which is why it spread so fast, why it turned up in board decks, and why it's now driving actual decisions about which crawlers people will let through the door.

And it's not a 2025 story that's kind of settled down.

At its developer conference back in May, Google said AI mode had passed a billion monthly users and that its queries have, in their words, more than doubled every quarter since launch.