AI platforms sent 1.13 billion referrals to the world’s top 1,000 websites in June 2025. That’s a 357% spike since June 2024, according to new data from Similarweb. But Google Search still dominates with 191 billion referrals in the same month.
News and media sites are feeling the squeeze. They’re prepping for “Google Zero” — the day Google could stop sending traffic their way. The Wall Street Journal recently reported AI summaries are killing news site traffic. A new Pew Research Center study found that 18% of 69,000 Google searches showed AI Overviews, but users clicked links only 8% of the time when summaries were present. Without summaries, click-throughs nearly doubled to 15%.
Similarweb says AI referrals to news and media jumped 770% over the past year. Yahoo led the category with 2.3 million AI referrals in June, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9M), Reuters (1.8M), and The Guardian (1.7M). Some publishers like The New York Times block AI access due to a lawsuit with OpenAI over article use for training. 
ChatGPT is the main driver here, making up over 80% of AI referrals. Other AI platforms include Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, and Claude.
Outside news, Amazon led e-commerce referrals with 4.5 million in June. Etsy and eBay followed with 2.0M and 1.8M. Google topped tech/social sites with 53.1 million referrals, far ahead of Reddit (11.1M), Facebook (11.0M), and Github (7.4M).
Similarweb excluded OpenAI’s site due to heavy ChatGPT-driven traffic.
Top AI referral sites by other categories included YouTube (31.2M), Wikipedia (10.8M), NIH.gov (5.2M), and Zillow (776.2K).
