In Graphic Detail: The state of AI referral traffic in 2025

One thing became clear this year: AI platforms are changing where, how and how much referral traffic gets sent to publishers’ sites. 

It’s a topic we covered often this year. ChatGPT referral traffic nearly doubled, but is still a very small percentage of publishers’ overall traffic. Google’s AI Overviews, its AI-generated summaries on the search page, reduced click-through rates across more search queries. And as the year comes to a close, publishers are figuring out how to maintain brand visibility in AI search.

The five graphs below illustrate where AI referrals stand today — which platforms are gaining share, sending traffic and driving conversions. Together, they reveal a new audience pipeline forming outside of traditional search and social platforms, giving a preview of next year’s competitive landscape for publishers.

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What publishers are wishing for this holiday season: End AI scraping and determine AI-powered audience value

If publishers had one Christmas wish, it’d be for the chaos to end. 

That means an end to the unscrupulous AI scraping that’s made even the notorious Wild West of ad tech in the mid to late 2010s look like small fry.  

Naturally, the toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to AI companies training on publishers’ archives, but now the industry is fighting to shape what comes next. Publishers want a fair, structured, regulated AI environment that involves AI companies not just splurging on chips and computing power, but actually coughing up for the information their large language models (LLMs) churn out. 

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