A report by digital market intelligence firm Similarweb reveals that referrals to news publishers from ChatGPT have increased significantly.

However, this growth is not enough to counter the overall decline in website traffic, as users are increasingly accessing news through AI and AI-powered search results.

News-related prompts on ChatGPT surged by 212% between January 2024 and May 2025.

Referrals to news sites rose from under 1 million in early 2024 to over 25 million in 2025, a significant increase.

Despite this growth, it has not offset the broader decline in organic traffic.

Some publishers have benefited more from ChatGPT referrals than others. Reuters, NY Post, and Business Insider saw year-over-year traffic increases of 8.9%, 7.1%, and 6.5%, respectively.

In contrast, The New York Times experienced a smaller increase of 3.1% in ChatGPT referral traffic amid its legal dispute with OpenAI over alleged content scraping.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ The historical pattern of declining publisher traffic repeats with each technological disruption

The AI-driven traffic decline follows a familiar historical pattern for publishers who have repeatedly faced disruption from new technologies.

News publishers have experienced a series of existential challenges, from the initial internet disruption that democratized information access to social media’s rise that changed how news was discovered and shared 1.

In 2019, publishers were already facing substantial drops in advertising revenue, pushing many toward subscription models, with The New York Times reaching 4 million subscribers 2.

Now history repeats as AI referrals (growing 25x to 25 million) fail to compensate for massive organic traffic losses (from 2.3 billion to under 1.7 billion visits) 3.

This pattern shows how publishers repeatedly become dependent on technology platforms that can change priorities, creating cycles of adaptation, dependency, and disruption.

2️⃣ A widening divide between publishers in the AI era