See where you stand. Know what to do next.
Explore the journey using the menu across the top. Filter by industry—and uncover the trends shaping experiences in 2026.
Dive into the data-
The AI Impact
Organic search is slipping
AI traffic remains small, but it’s already changing the mix. Organic search is declining, and SEO is feeling the pressure of changing discovery behavior.
View data-9% -
Engagement
Holding attention is getting harder
Visitors are spending less time engaging once they arrive. This means that creating better digital experiences is just as critical as acquisition.
View data-7% -
Frustration
Less rage means deeper journeys
Reducing rage-per-page by 1.5 percentage points leads to more engagement and page views per session.
View data+1 page -
Conversion
New visitors are converting far less
Conversion rates declined across segments, with the steepest drop among first-time visitors. The gap between traffic and results is widening.
View data-9% -
Conversations
Sentiment steers conversation outcomes
When service conversations shift in a positive direction, resolution rates more than double versus interactions where sentiment declines.
View data67% vs. 28% -
Traffic
The cost of a visit keeps climbing
Another year, another surge in traffic spend. These higher acquisition costs leave less room for wasted traffic as teams pay more for the same attention.
View data+9%
6,500+ websites
across 9 industries and dozens of sub-segments in 71 countries
99+ billion sessions
browsing 500 billion+ page views across web and mobile
22+ million customer service conversations
analyzing outreach drivers, sentiment, and outcomes from voice, chat, and email
Your industry.
Our data.
Their experiences.
The Digital Experience Benchmarks distill billions of interactions into clear, actionable insights—revealing how your performance stacks up across industries and journeys, and where the real opportunities lie in 2026.
About the dataset
This year’s benchmarks are built on activity collected across the Contentsquare platform and enhanced with Conversation Intelligence (new this year!). The dataset spans more than 6,500 websites and captures over 99 billion visits and 500 billion page views from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025.
To protect anonymity and ensure analytical rigor, all data is strictly aggregated and held to high methodological standards of sample size, diversity, and consistency. Small discrepancies may occur due to rounding.
AI-referred traffic includes visits that originate directly from AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and others.
About Conversations
Analysis period
Industries included
The dataset spans the full digital landscape across nine industries:
- Energy, Utilities, & Construction:
engineering, design & construction, electricity, and oil & gas - Financial Services:
Real estate, fintech, investments, insurance, and banking - Manufacturing:
industrial & durable goods, chemicals, pharmaceuticals & health, computer equipment & medical devices, and automotive - Media:
News services, publishing, music, internet & social networking services, and broadcasting - Retail:
Ecommerce brands, retailers, grocery, and consumer packaged goods companies - Services:
Consumer services and business services - Software:
Mobile apps, CRM, legal, engineering & healthcare software, infrastructure, security, content & collaboration software, ERP software, gaming, and business intelligence
Telecommunications: Internet, telephony & wireless, and cable & satellite - Travel & Hospitality:
Airlines, fitness & wellness, rail & bus, cruise lines, restaurants, car & truck rentals, entertainment, travel agencies & services, and hotels & resorts
Traffic
AI still drives only a small share of direct traffic, but its impact is reshaping the top of the funnel. Organic search—long a reliable source—is losing clicks as more questions are answered off-site. Increasingly, the journey begins before the visit, changing both who arrives and how much they already know.
Read story
Engagement
Sessions were cut shorter this year, as both page views and time on site declined. But reduced consumption doesn’t necessarily mean lower intent. As AI-influenced traffic informs visitors earlier, they arrive more prepared—and with higher expectations. They want experiences that recognize where they’re starting, not broad one-size-fits-all paths.
“Our entire team (creative, marketing, merchandising) is now familiar with unique behavioral metrics such as click rate, exposure rate, and scroll rate.”
Read story
Frustration
Frustration isn’t something to fix later. It shapes the experience and sways the outcomes of every visit. Our new data on rage-per-page shows just how much this matters: small spikes in friction can quickly turn engagement into exit.
What do we mean by ‘frustration’?
Frustration includes the specific moments of friction observed during the on-site experience, including:
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Javascript error rate: Javascript code produces an error
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Slow page load: Page loads that exceed 3 seconds
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Rage click: An element was clicked at least 3 times in less than 2 seconds
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Multiple button click: A button was clicked at least 3 times
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Multiple field click: A field was clicked at least 3 times
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Multiple use target: An element was clicked at least 3 times
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Low page activity: A visitor doesn’t click or tap on the page.
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API error: An API request fails to return the expected response.
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Conversion
Conversion is never just a button click—it reflects the entire journey. This year’s benchmarks reveal how shifts in marketing mix, engagement, and friction shape final outcomes. As expectations rise and attention tightens, even small journey gaps can have an outsized impact. This means the quality of your digital experience is more important than ever.
Conversion benchmarks include only sites that collect conversion events.
“We can spend less time analyzing and more time thinking about what we can do about certain issues.”
Read story
Retention
With acquisition costs climbing, retention has taken center stage. Brands are leaning on repeat visitors, who engage more, convert better, and reduce reliance on expensive acquisition. More than ever, loyalty remains critical for sustainable growth.
Read story
Conversations
Like the entire customer journey, service conversations are also evolving—from bot-only interactions to blended, human-led support. Resolution still matters, but how the experience feels tells a deeper story. Sentiment, and how it changes throughout a service interaction, strongly shapes the final outcome.
About Conversations
Conversational data is aggregated from more than 20 million customer-service conversations collected in 2025 from brands using the conversation intelligence platform, Loris, a Contentsquare company.
To qualify for inclusion, conversations had to meet minimum criteria:
- Resolution benchmarks: Conversations must include at least one customer message and one agent response
- Sentiment change analysis: Conversations must contain two or more messages
Areas of business are defined using a consistent set of aggregated categories to enable reliable comparison across conversations.
“Customer experience is shifting fast, and conversations are becoming central to how people interact with businesses.
With Conversation Intelligence, we help teams understand and optimize conversations, and connect them to the broader digital journey. It’s not just about better support: it’s about gaining a competitive edge as conversations become the next frontier of customer experience.”