As we continue to evolve our public web presence across the UNC School of Medicine (SOM), understanding where and how our websites are being used can help guide efforts to improve visibility, engagement, and impact\u2014especially among users in North Carolina, our most important audience.<\/p>\n
In 2025, the School of Medicine WordPress Network recorded over 15.2 million pageviews<\/strong>, with 12.3 million<\/strong> coming from users in the United States. North Carolina users alone accounted for more than 5.3 million pageviews \u2014 approximately 35% of total traffic.<\/strong><\/p>\n More importantly, North Carolina users were substantially more engaged than all other users<\/strong>, and those engagement gains increased year-over-year.<\/p>\n Takeaway:<\/strong> When we create targeted, high-value content relevant to North Carolinians, those users stay longer and explore more deeply \u2014 reinforcing the importance of locally relevant, mission-aligned content. Read more about cleaning up website content<\/a>.<\/p>\n Organic search remains the dominant path to discovery. In 2025, nearly 76% of all sessions originated from Google search<\/strong>, while combined social media referrals (Facebook, LinkedIn, X, etc.) accounted for roughly 1%<\/strong> of sessions.<\/p>\n This reinforces a critical principle for all UNC SOM web authors:<\/strong> Investments in:<\/p>\n will consistently outperform time spent chasing social media traffic.<\/p>\n In 2025, the www.med.unc.edu domain<\/strong> received:<\/p>\n While the network contains 137,789 URLs with at least one pageview<\/strong>, traffic is highly concentrated:<\/p>\n Implication:<\/strong> Strategic focus on fewer, higher-value pages will drive disproportionately better results than spreading effort thinly across thousands of low-impact URLs. Cleaning up and removing low-value content will free up time to focus on important areas. Read more about how to (re)focus your website content<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2025, we began to see early signals of how artificial intelligence (AI) platforms are intersecting with website traffic and information discovery. While AI-generated referral traffic currently represents a very small share of overall sessions, the implications extend far beyond measurable clicks and pageviews.<\/p>\n AI-generated traffic referrals accounted for approximately 0.64% of all sessions in 2025<\/strong>, with ChatGPT responsible for 73% of those referrals<\/strong>.<\/p>\n AI platforms such as ChatGPT are increasingly being used as research tools<\/strong>, often replacing traditional search behavior entirely. In many cases, users receive answers, summaries, or recommendations without ever clicking through to a website<\/strong>.<\/p>\n As a result:<\/p>\n This represents a fundamental shift: visibility and influence are increasingly decoupled from traffic metrics.<\/strong><\/p>\n Takeaway:<\/strong> The same practices that improve SEO<\/a> also improve AI interpretation<\/p>\n Among U.S. users, device usage was nearly evenly split:<\/p>\n Mobile users primarily accessed content via:<\/p>\n Browser usage was dominated by:<\/p>\n This reinforces the need for mobile-first design, performance optimization, and cross-browser testing \u2014 particularly on Chrome and Safari.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As we continue to evolve our public web presence across the UNC School of Medicine (SOM), understanding where and how our websites are being used can help guide efforts to improve visibility, engagement, and impact\u2014especially among users in North Carolina, our most important audience. 2025 SOM Website Traffic at a Glance In 2025, the School … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3206,"featured_media":0,"parent":14846,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"layout":"","cellInformation":"","apiCallInformation":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-14243","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","odd"],"acf":[],"_links_to":[],"_links_to_target":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14243"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15083,"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14243\/revisions\/15083"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/webguide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Search Engines Drive Discovery \u2014 Not Social Media<\/h2>\n
\nSearch engine optimization (SEO)<\/a> is the most effective and measurable way to grow meaningful audience engagement.<\/p>\n\n
SEO Performance and the Long-Tail Reality<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
AI Referral Traffic: Early Signals, Clear Implications<\/h2>\n
What the Data Is (and Isn\u2019t) Telling Us<\/h3>\n
\n
Device and Browser Usage<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n