By Sara Guaglione * February 24, 2025 *
Ivy Liu
Traffic sent to publisher’s sites by AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity has been growing. While it makes sense for publishers who have signed agreements with these companies to receive credit for their content that appears on AI chatbots or search platforms, the data shows that referral traffic to sites that try to block crawlers from those platforms is increasing.
Executives at three large digital companies told Digiday that they have recently seen referral traffic increase from Open-AI owned ChatGPT.
In the last few months, ChatGPT has seen a “significant increase” in traffic at The Atlantic. A spokesperson said that referrals increased by more than 80% between December and January. The Atlantic signed an agreement with OpenAI for May 2024.
An anonymous source familiar with data from one of these publishers said that their company saw more traffic coming from ChatGPT than Bluesky and Snapchat. Another executive said that they had seen an “modest” increase of ChatGPT traffic. Both sources refused to answer questions about the amount of increase they saw. Michael Hadgis (CRO at Blavity) said that he saw an increase in referral traffic from Perplexity. However, he refused to disclose how much. (Blavity participates in Perplexity’s revenue sharing program.)
OpenAI began testing their SearchGPT search engine in July last year, which links to other sources. It was then integrated into ChatGPT by the end of October, and made available for all users this month. Perplexity has always included links to website within its answers.
While publishers receive more traffic from AI platforms, this traffic is not as significant for many publishers in comparison to other referral platforms.
A FT Strategies report revealed that ChatGPT contributed 100,000 sessions referrals to 106 publishers of news in December 2024. This is up from a single digit in January 2024 but only averages 943 session referrals for each publisher. Perplexity session referals also increased during that time period, from 8,000 in January 2024 to over 53,000 in December 20,24. This is an average of 500 per publisher.
Chartbeat data shows a similar trend. ChatGPT pageviews increased from 371,000 pageviews in August 2024, to 3,000,000 pageviews in Jan 2025. This averages 857 pageviews for each publisher.
Digiday contacted FT Strategies and Chartbeat in order to determine how they calculate metrics such as sessions and pageviews to compare their data. They did not respond to Digiday before publication. Wes Bonner is the head of social for BDG and he says that BDG only receives a few thousand visits per month from ChatGPT.
According to a third anonymous publishing executive, Digiday, their traffic from AI-based referral sources – such as ChatGPT and Perplexity – was less that 10% of what they were getting from X. The publisher received about a third of its traffic from Bluesky from these platforms.
According to a fourth publishing executive who requested anonymity, their company has received “zero” traffic from these platforms. They do not have any commercial deals with OpenAI and Perplexity. “I haven’t seen a single pageview attributed to an AI platform,” said the publisher.
However, some publishers are experiencing more traffic from AI platforms. According to data from Similarweb, the total desktop and mobile web traffic sent by ChatGPT globally to 14 of the top news publishers, including The New York Times and Washington Post, increased from 435,000 visits in August 2024, to 3.5 millions in January 2025.
According to David Carr, editor for insights news and research, the data analytics company, Similarweb, shows that The Atlantic received 186,000 referrals in January 2025 from ChatGPT, compared to 22,000 from X. According to Similarweb, this was still a lot less than the 8,4 million visits that came from organic search, primarily Google, in January.
Furthermore, whether or not an AI platform has a content license agreement in place does not seem to predict how much traffic the platform will send a publisher. According to Similarweb data, The New York Times and CNN were the top referral sites from ChatGPT and Perplexity despite not signing agreements with these companies. BDG’s monthly visits of less than a thousand are coming from ChatGPT despite the publisher having no content licensing agreement with OpenAI.
But again, this traffic isn’t that significant when you look at the overall picture. In January, ChatGPT traffic represented less than 0.1% across all 14 publishers.
Even a tiny amount of traffic can be significant. Some publishers have The platforms are not complying with publishers’ requests to stop crawling.
The New York Times received 240.600 visits from ChatGPT during January 2025 despite the publisher’s request to block crawlers. The robots.txt file, which tells search engines what URLs they can crawl, has been updated to block crawlers from ChatGPTand Perplexity. The Times sued Microsoft in December 2023. claiming that these tech companies were using their copyrighted content to train AI models, surface their content in chatbots, and improve their search experiences.
https://digiday.com/?p=569961
