Referrals from ChatGPT to information publishers are rising, however not sufficient to counter the decline in clicks ensuing from customers increasingly getting their news directly from AI or AI-powered search results, in line with a report from digital market intelligence firm Similarweb.
For the reason that launch of Google’s AI Overviews in Might 2024, the agency discovered that the variety of information searches on the net that end in no click-throughs to information web sites has grown from 56% to just about 69% as of Might 2025.
Not surprisingly, natural site visitors has additionally declined, dropping from over 2.3 billion visits at its peak in mid-2024 to now underneath 1.7 billion.
In the meantime, news-related prompts in ChatGPT grew by 212% from January 2024 via Might 2025.
For information publishers, the fast adoption of AI is altering the sport. Visibility in Google Search outcomes and good search engine marketing practices might not ship the worth they did previously, as search rank isn’t translating into as a lot web site site visitors as earlier than, the agency identified.
On the similar time, ChatGPT referrals to information publishers are rising.
From January via Might 2024, ChatGPT referrals to information websites have been slightly below 1 million, Similarweb says, however have grown to greater than 25 million in 2025 — a 25x enhance.
After all, when the business is dealing with even large declines in natural search site visitors, this enhance is hardly sufficient to make up for publishers’ losses.
The report additionally famous that some web sites are faring higher than others on the subject of AI referrals.
Websites seeing essentially the most will increase in ChatGPT referral site visitors embrace Reuters (up 8.9% year-over-year), NY Put up (up 7.1%), and Enterprise Insider (up 6.5%). In the meantime, The New York Instances, which is suing OpenAI over allegedly scraping its works with out permission, is seeing far fewer ChatGPT referrals. Although nonetheless within the prime 10 websites receiving ChatGPT referral site visitors, it’s solely seen a 3.1% enhance.
Subjects like shares, finance, and sports activities are at present accounting for almost all of those ChatGPT news-related prompts, however Similarweb’s report notes different subjects are seeing development, too, like politics, the financial system, climate, and others.
This, the agency theorizes, might sign a transfer away from extra “reactive info” and towards deeper “issue-driven engagement” by way of AI.
Alongside the AI referrals development, ChatGPT’s web site and app customers have additionally seen larger adoption.
During the last six months, app customers have greater than doubled, whereas web site guests have been up 52%, Similarweb stated.
The agency is now offering a service for manufacturers and companies that enables them to trace how and the place their model reveals up in GenAI instruments like ChatGPT, and the way that compares to their competitors.
Options to the information publishers’ disaster are few and much between.
Underneath strain from information publishers as AI kills their site visitors, Google recently launched a service called Offerwall that enables publishers utilizing Google Advert Supervisor to experiment with different technique of monetization past extra traffic-dependent choices, like advertisements. With Offerwall, publishers can as an alternative strive issues like micropayments or asking customers to enroll in newsletters to entry their website’s content material, for instance. They’ll additionally customise the Offerwall screens with choices of their very own, Google stated.
Different websites are experimenting with paywalls or different technique of monetization. Many have since conducted mass layoffs and even shut down their operations.
In a latest interview with The NYT’s Hard Fork podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to a query about AI’s influence on the job market by saying, “I do assume there will likely be areas the place some jobs go away, or possibly there will likely be some complete classes of jobs that go away. And any job that goes away, even when it’s good for society and the financial system as a complete, may be very painful — extraordinarily painful — in that second … there may be going to be actual ache right here in lots of circumstances.”