Referral traffic from AI platforms grows despite publishers’ attempts to block crawlers

The Atlantic saw a “significant” increase in traffic from ChatGPT in the past few months. Referrals rose by more than 80% from December to January, according to a spokesperson. The Atlantic signed a deal with OpenAI in May 2024.

A person familiar with the data at one of those publishers – who asked to speak anonymously – said their company was seeing more traffic from ChatGPT than Bluesky or Snapchat. Another exec said they had seen a “modest” increase in ChatGPT traffic. Both sources did not respond to questions about how much of an increase they were seeing.

Michael Hadgis, CRO at Blavity, said he was seeing an increase of referral traffic from Perplexity, though he declined to share how much of an increase. (Blavity is part of Perplexity’s revenue share program.)

Last July, OpenAI began testing its SearchGPT search engine, which links to sources, before it was integrated into ChatGPT at the end of October and made available to all users this month. Perplexity, meanwhile, has always included links to websites within answers on the platform.

However, while publishers are receiving more traffic from the AI platforms, for many publishers that traffic doesn’t amount to all that much in the context of other referral platforms. 

An FT Strategies report found that ChatGPT contributed 100,000 session referrals in December 2024 to 106 news publishers. That’s up from single digits in January 2024, but averages out to only 943 session referrals per publisher. Perplexity session referrals also increased in that time frame, from 8,000 session referrals in January 2024 to 53,000 in December 2024, though for an average of 500 referrals per publisher.

Data from Chartbeat shows a similar dynamic. Across more than 3,5000 news and non-news publishers, pageviews from ChatGPT increased from 371,000 in August 2024 to 3 million pageviews in January 2025. That averages out to 857 pageviews per publisher.

Digiday reached out to FT Strategies and Chartbeat to define how they’re calculating metrics like sessions and pageviews in order to compare their data. They did not respond before publishing time.

BDG is only seeing a couple thousand visits a month from ChatGPT, according to Wes Bonner, head of social at BDG.

A third anonymous publishing exec told Digiday that their traffic from AI referral sources – including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Edge/Bing, and Google Gemini – was less than 10% of what the publisher was getting from X (which isn’t much, either), they said. Traffic from those platforms also represented about a third of what the publisher was receiving from Bluesky.

A fourth publishing exec that requested anonymity said their company – which does not have commercial deals with OpenAI or Perplexity – has seen “zero traffic” from those platforms. 

“I have not seen one pageview attributable to an AI platform,” they said.

Some publishers are seeing more significant traffic from the AI platforms, though. Data from Similarweb shows total desktop and mobile web visits globally sent from ChatGPT to 14 top news publishers (including The New York Times, Washington Post and the Guardian, among others) increased from 435,000 in August 2024 to 3.5 million in January 2025. 

For example, Similarweb’s data shows The Atlantic had about 186,000 referrals from ChatGPT in January 2025 – compared to about 22,000 from X, according to David Carr, editor of insights news and research at the data analytics company. However, that was a whole lot less than the 8.4 million visits from organic search in January, primarily from Google, according to Similarweb’s data. 

Moreover, whether or not a publisher has a content licensing deal in place with an AI platform doesn’t seem to prefigure how much traffic a publisher does or does not receive from the platforms.

The New York Times, Forbes and CNN were at the top of referral visits from ChatGPT and Perplexity, per Similarweb’s data, despite not having signed agreements with those companies. And BDG’s single-digit thousand monthly visits from ChatGPT are coming despite the publisher not having a content licensing deal with OpenAI.

However, again, all of this traffic isn’t all that meaningful when looking at the overall picture. Traffic from ChatGPT represented less than 0.1% of all visits across all 14 publishers in January.

But even a minuscule amount of traffic from an AI platform can be meaningful. Some publishers have attempted to block AI platforms’ crawlers from accessing their sites’ content, but the referral traffic figures indicate the platforms may not be abiding publishers’ no-crawling requests.
The New York Times, for example, received 240,600 visits from ChatGPT in January 2025, despite the publisher blocking crawlers from ChatGPT and Perplexity in its robots.txt protocol — the file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can access. The Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, alleging just that – those tech companies were using their copyrighted articles to train AI models and surface their content in their chatbots and search experiences.