AI referrals to top websites were up 357% year-over-year in June, reaching 1.13B

The digital landscape is undergoing a significant transformation as Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms rapidly emerge as powerful drivers of web traffic. While Google Search continues to dominate the referral space, new data from market intelligence provider Similarweb reveals a dramatic surge in AI-generated referrals. In June 2025, AI platforms collectively sent over 1.13 billion referrals to the world’s top 1,000 websites, marking an astonishing 357% increase compared to June 2024.

Despite this impressive growth, Google Search remains the undisputed leader, accounting for a staggering 191 billion referrals to these same websites during June 2025. This highlights the immense scale of traditional search, even as AI’s influence expands.

A particularly scrutinized sector in this evolving environment is news and media. Publishers are grappling with declining traffic, fueled by concerns over a phenomenon termed “Google Zero,” where Google’s AI Overviews could potentially reduce direct traffic to news sites. Recent reports, including one highlighted by The Wall Street Journal and discussed by TechCrunch, indicate that AI overviews are indeed impacting traffic to news outlets. Further supporting this trend, a Pew Research Center study conducted in July 2025 found that among 69,000 searches by 900 U.S. Google users, 18% displayed AI Overviews. In these instances, users clicked on links only 8% of the time, a stark contrast to the 15% click-through rate observed when no AI summary was present.

For news and media websites, AI referrals have seen an even more pronounced surge, increasing by 770% since June 2024. However, the distribution of this traffic is not uniform; sites that block AI platforms, such as The New York Times due to its ongoing lawsuit with OpenAI, naturally receive fewer referrals. Leading the pack in the news media category for June 2025 were Yahoo with 2.3 million AI referrals, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9M), Reuters (1.8M), The Guardian (1.7M), India Times (1.2M), and Business Insider (1.0M).

Similarweb’s methodology for AI referrals encompasses web traffic originating from AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Liner. Notably, ChatGPT stands out, single-handedly responsible for over 80% of all AI referrals to the top 1,000 domains analyzed.

Beyond news and media, Similarweb’s analysis spanned various other categories, including e-commerce, science and education, tech/search/social media, arts and entertainment, and business. In the e-commerce sector for June, Amazon led with 4.5 million AI referrals, followed by Etsy (2.0M) and eBay (1.8M).

Within the tech and social media landscape, Google predictably topped the list with 53.1 million AI referrals in June, showcasing AI’s role even within its own ecosystem. Other significant players included 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). It’s worth noting that OpenAI’s own website was excluded from this analysis due to its extensive self-referrals from ChatGPT.

Across various other diverse domains, top performers by AI referrals 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).

These findings underscore AI’s rapidly accelerating impact on web traffic, signaling a pivotal shift in how users discover and interact with online content. For platforms like Proaitools, an AI Tools Listing Website, this growth presents both opportunities and challenges in navigating the evolving digital ecosystem.