AI referrals to websites are growing rapidly but still lag far behind the traffic generated by Google Search. According to new data from market intelligence provider Similarweb, AI platforms generated over 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites globally in June 2025—a 357% increase since June 2024. Despite this growth, Google Search remains the dominant source of traffic, accounting for 191 billion referrals during the same period.
News and media websites are particularly affected by these trends. Publishers are experiencing traffic declines and preparing for what they call “Google Zero,” a scenario where Google stops sending traffic to websites. For example, The Wall Street Journal reported that AI overviews are significantly reducing traffic to news sites. A Pew Research Center study found that when AI summaries appear in search results, users click on links only 8% of the time, compared to 15% when no AI summary is present.
Similarweb’s data shows that AI referrals to news and media websites surged by 770% since June 2024. However, some sites, like The New York Times, block AI platforms due to legal disputes over content usage, affecting their referral numbers. In June 2025, Yahoo led the news media category with 2.3 million AI referrals, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9 million), Reuters (1.8 million), The Guardian (1.7 million), India Times (1.2 million), and Business Insider (1.0 million).
Similarweb defines AI referrals as web traffic from platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Liner. ChatGPT dominates this space, responsible for over 80% of AI referrals to the top 1,000 domains.
The analysis also examined other industries. In e-commerce, Amazon received the most AI referrals (4.5 million), followed by Etsy (2.0 million) and eBay (1.8 million). Among tech and social media sites, Google led with 53.1 million referrals, ahead of Reddit (11.1 million), Facebook (11.0 million), and GitHub (7.4 million).
Top performers in other categories included YouTube (31.2 million), Research Gate (3.6 million), Zillow (776,200), Europa.eu (992,900), Wikipedia (10.8 million), NIH.gov (5.2 million), Investing.com (1.2 million), Home Depot (1.2 million), Kayak (456,500), and Zara (325,600). The OpenAI website was excluded from the analysis due to its high volume of ChatGPT-related referrals.