AI referral websites still have a way to go to catch traffic that provides Google search, but they are growing quickly. According to new data from market intelligence provider SimilarIn June, AI platforms produced more than 1.13 billion referrals for top 1,000 websites globally, a figure that is 357% since June 2024.
However, Google Search is still responsible for most traffic for these sites, accounting for 191 billion referrals during the same period of June 2025.
These days there is a special category of interest news and media. Online publishers are watching a decline in traffic and preparing for a day they are saying “Google Zero” Google stops sending traffic to websites,
For example, Wall Street Journal recently reported on data that showed how AI overview was hitting traffic on news sites. Also, A Pew research center study This week found that in a survey of 900 US Google users, 18% of some of the 69,000 discoveries showed AI overview, due to which users clicked the link at 8% time. When there was no AI summary, users clicked the link about twice, or 15% time.
Similarly, it was found that June 2024 was 770% above June 2024 for AI referral news and media websites. Some sites will naturally rank more than others that are blocking access to AI platforms, as the New York Times, as a result of its case with OpenaiI on the use of their articles to train their models.
In the news media category, Yahoo led with 2.3 million AI referral in June 2025, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9 m), Reuters (1.8 m), The Guardian (1.7m), India Times (1.2 m), and Business Insider (1.0 m).
In terms of functioning, similar AIWEB AI referrals are counted as an AI platform such as chat, Gemini, Dipsek, Grocke, Perplexity, Cloud and Domain as domains as a web referral. Chatgpt dominates here, accounting for top 1,000 domains for more than 80% of AI referral.
The company’s analysis also saw other categories beyond news like e-commerce, science and education, technology/search/social media, art and entertainment, business, and others.
In e-commerce, Amazon was followed by Etsy and EBAY, when it came to sites that were looking at the most referrals at 4.5m, 2.0m and 1.8m respectively during June.
In top technology and social sites, Google, not surprisingly, with 53.1 million referrals in June, was at the top of the list, followed by Reddit (11.1m), Facebook (11.0m), GITHUB (7.4m), GITHUB (7.4m), Microsoft (5.1m), Canva (5.0m), INSTAGRAM (4.0m), INSTAGRAM (4.0m), Intagram (4.7m), Linkedin (4.7m),
The analysis excluded the Openai website as its many referrals were from Chatgpt, which pointed to its services.
In all other domains, AI referral for each category 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), in the house. And Zara (325.6k).
