Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of visits where someone lands on your site and leaves without engaging with it.
Bounce rate is the share of visits where someone arrives on your site and leaves without doing anything more. It's one of the first numbers marketers look at to judge whether a page gives people what they came for.
A high bounce rate isn't always bad, though. If someone wanted your opening hours and found them on the first page, they had a good visit and still bounced.
How it's counted
Each analytics tool has its own rule. In older versions of Google Analytics, a bounce was a visit that saw a single page. Google Analytics 4 changed that. It now counts a visit as engaged when it lasts more than 10 seconds, sees at least two pages, or has a key event, and bounce rate is the share of visits that weren't engaged.
So the same site can show a very different bounce rate in two tools, or before and after a switch. Compare like with like.
Reading it page by page
A bounce rate for your whole site hides more than it shows. Read it for each landing page, and next to what the page is for.
For example, Fernhill Coffee's subscription page has a bounce rate of 70%, and its brewing guide has 40%. The guide looks better, but the subscription page sells, and most of its bounces are people who read the price and left. Fernhill would learn more from changes to the subscription page's sign-ups than from its bounce rate.
Bounce rate for AI visitors
Visitors who arrive from an AI assistant have often read a summary of your page already. Some come to check one detail or to buy. Others leave quickly because the answer told them something your page doesn't match. Looking at AI visits apart from your other traffic shows which of those is happening.
In AnswerOrbit
The AI traffic tab in Website brings in, from Google Analytics, the visits AI assistants send you, by assistant and landing page. If you've set up key events, you'll see an engagement rate, using the same rule as Google Analytics: over 10 seconds, two pages or a key event. Take it from 100% and you have the bounce rate for those visits. See Website and AI traffic.