Ai Referrals To Top Websites Were Up 357% Year-over-year In June, Reaching 1.13b

AI referrals to websites still person a measurement to spell to drawback up to nan postulation that Google Search provides, but they’re increasing quickly. According to caller information from marketplace intelligence supplier Similarweb, AI platforms successful June generated complete 1.13 cardinal referrals to nan apical 1,000 websites globally, a fig that’s up 357% since June 2024.

However, Google Search still accounts for nan mostly of postulation to these sites, accounting for 191 cardinal referrals during nan aforesaid play of June 2025.

One peculiar class of liking these days is news and media. Online publishers are seeing postulation declines and are preparing for a time they’re calling “Google Zero,” erstwhile Google stops sending postulation to websites.

For instance, The Wall Street Journal precocious reported connected information that showed really AI overviews were sidesplitting postulation to news sites. Plus, a Pew Research Center study retired this week recovered that successful a study of 900 U.S. Google users, 18% of immoderate 69,000 searches showed AI Overviews, which led to users clicking links 8% of nan time. When location was nary AI summary, users clicked links astir doubly arsenic much, aliases 15% of nan time.

Similarweb recovered that June’s AI referrals to news and media websites were up 770% since June 2024. Some sites will people rank higher than others that are blocking entree to AI platforms, arsenic The New York Times does, arsenic a consequence of its suit pinch OpenAI complete nan usage of its articles to train its models.

In nan news media category, Yahoo led pinch 2.3 cardinal AI referrals successful June 2025, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9M), Reuters (1.8M), The Guardian (1.7M), India Times (1.2M), and Business Insider (1.0M).

In position of methodology, Similarweb counts AI referrals arsenic web referrals to a domain from an AI level for illustration ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Liner. ChatGPT dominates here, accounting for much than 80% of nan AI referrals to nan apical 1,000 domains.

The company’s study besides looked astatine different categories beyond news, for illustration e-commerce, subject and education, tech/search/social media, arts and entertainment, business, and others.

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In e-commerce, Amazon was followed by Etsy and eBay erstwhile it came to those sites seeing nan astir referrals, astatine 4.5M, 2.0M, and 1.8M, respectively, during June.

Among nan apical tech and societal sites, Google, not surprisingly, was astatine nan apical of nan list, pinch 53.1 cardinal referrals successful June, followed by Reddit (11.1M), Facebook (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 study excluded nan OpenAI website because truthful galore of its referrals were from ChatGPT, pointing to its services.

Across each different domains, nan No. 1 tract by AI referrals for each class included YouTube (31.2M), Research Gate (3.6M), Zillow (776.2K), Europa.eu (992.9K), Wikipedia (10.8M), NIH.gov (5.2M), Investing.com (1.2M), Home Depot (1.2M), Kayak (456.5K), and Zara (325.6K).