AI referrals to web sites nonetheless have a solution to go to catch as much as the site visitors that Google Search offers, however they’re rising rapidly. Based on new knowledge from market intelligence supplier Similarweb, AI platforms in June generated over 1.13 billion referrals to the highest 1,000 web sites globally, a determine that’s up 357% since June 2024.
Nevertheless, Google Search nonetheless accounts for almost all of site visitors to those websites, accounting for 191 billion referrals throughout the identical interval of June 2025.
One explicit class of curiosity as of late is information and media. On-line publishers are seeing site visitors declines and are getting ready for a day they’re calling “Google Zero,” when Google stops sending traffic to websites.
For example, The Wall Avenue Journal lately reported on knowledge that confirmed how AI overviews were killing traffic to news sites. Plus, a Pew Research Center study out this week discovered that in a survey of 900 U.S. Google customers, 18% of some 69,000 searches confirmed AI Overviews, which led to customers clicking hyperlinks 8% of the time. When there was no AI abstract, customers clicked hyperlinks practically twice as a lot, or 15% of the time.
Similarweb discovered that June’s AI referrals to information and media web sites have been up 770% since June 2024. Some websites will naturally rank larger than others which might be blocking entry to AI platforms, as The New York Occasions does, because of its lawsuit with OpenAI over using its articles to coach its fashions.
Within the information media class, Yahoo led with 2.3 million AI referrals in June 2025, adopted by Yahoo Japan (1.9M), Reuters (1.8M), The Guardian (1.7M), India Occasions (1.2M), and Enterprise Insider (1.0M).
By way of methodology, Similarweb counts AI referrals as internet referrals to a website from an AI platform like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Liner. ChatGPT dominates right here, accounting for greater than 80% of the AI referrals to the highest 1,000 domains.
The corporate’s evaluation additionally checked out different classes past information, like e-commerce, science and schooling, tech/search/social media, arts and leisure, enterprise, and others.
In e-commerce, Amazon was adopted by Etsy and eBay when it got here to these websites seeing probably the most referrals, at 4.5M, 2.0M, and 1.8M, respectively, throughout June.
Among the many prime tech and social websites, Google, not surprisingly, was on the prime of the record, with 53.1 million referrals in June, adopted by Reddit (11.1M), Fb (11.0M), Github (7.4M), Microsoft (5.1M), Canva (5.0M), Instagram (4.7M), LinkedIn (4.4M), Bing (3.1M), and Pinterest (2.5M).
The evaluation excluded the OpenAI web site as a result of so lots of its referrals have been from ChatGPT, pointing to its companies.
Throughout all different domains, the No. 1 website by AI referrals for every class included YouTube (31.2M), Analysis Gate (3.6M), Zillow (776.2K), Europa.eu (992.9K), Wikipedia (10.8M), NIH.gov (5.2M), Investing.com (1.2M), Dwelling Depot (1.2M), Kayak (456.5K), and Zara (325.6K).
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