Referrals from ChatGPT to news publishers are growing, but not enough to counter the decline in clicks resulting from users increasingly getting their news directly from AI or AI-powered search results, according to a report from digital market intelligence company Similarweb.
Since the launch of Google’s AI Overviews in May 2024, the firm found that the number of news searches on the web that result in no click-throughs to news websites has grown from 56% to nearly 69% as of May 2025.
Not surprisingly, organic traffic has also declined, dropping from over 2.3 billion visits at its peak in mid-2024 to now under 1.7 billion.
Meanwhile, news-related prompts in ChatGPT grew by 212% from January 2024 through May 2025.
For news publishers, the rapid adoption of AI is changing the game. Visibility in Google Search results and good SEO practices may no longer deliver the value they did in the past, as search rank isn’t translating into as much website traffic as before, the firm pointed out.
At the same time, ChatGPT referrals to news publishers are growing.
From January through May 2024, ChatGPT referrals to news sites were just under 1 million, Similarweb says, but have grown to more than 25 million in 2025 — a 25x increase.
Of course, when the industry is facing even massive declines in organic search traffic, this increase is hardly enough to make up for publishers’ losses.
The report also noted that some websites are faring better than others when it comes to AI referrals.
Sites seeing the most increases in ChatGPT referral traffic include Reuters (up 8.9% year-over-year), NY Post (up 7.1%), and Business Insider (up 6.5%). Meanwhile, The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI over allegedly scraping its works without permission, is seeing far fewer ChatGPT referrals. Though still in the top 10 sites receiving ChatGPT referral traffic, it’s only seen a 3.1% increase.
Topics like stocks, finance, and sports are currently accounting for the majority of these ChatGPT news-related prompts, but Similarweb’s report notes other topics are seeing growth, too, like politics, the economy, weather, and others.
This, the firm theorizes, may signal a move away from more “reactive information” and toward deeper “issue-driven engagement” via AI.
Alongside the AI referrals growth, ChatGPT’s website and app users have also seen greater adoption.
Over the last six months, app users have more than doubled, while website visitors were up 52%, Similarweb said.
The firm is now offering a service for brands and businesses that allows them to track how and where their brand shows up in GenAI tools like ChatGPT, and how that compares to their competition.
Solutions to the news publishers’ crisis are few and far between.
Under pressure from news publishers as AI kills their traffic, Google recently launched a service called Offerwall that allows publishers using Google Ad Manager to experiment with other means of monetization beyond more traffic-dependent options, like ads. With Offerwall, publishers can instead try things like micropayments or asking users to sign up for newsletters to access their site’s content, for example. They can also customize the Offerwall screens with options of their own, Google said.
Other sites are experimenting with paywalls or other means of monetization. Many have since conducted mass layoffs or even shut down their operations.
In a recent interview with The NYT’s Hard Fork podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to a question about AI’s impact on the job market by saying, “I do think there will be areas where some jobs go away, or maybe there will be some whole categories of jobs that go away. And any job that goes away, even if it’s good for society and the economy as a whole, is very painful — extremely painful — in that moment … there is going to be real pain here in many cases.”
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