AI referrals to top websites were up 357% year-over-year in June, reaching 1.13B
AI references to websites still have a way to make up the traffic that Google Search offers, but they grow fast. According to new data from Market Intelligence Provider Similar webAI platforms generated more than 1.13 billion references to the top 1,000 websites worldwide in June, a figure that has risen by 357% since June 2024.
Google search, however, is still responsible for most of the traffic to these sites, good for 191 billion references in the same period of June 2025.
A certain category of interest is nowadays news and media. Online publishers see the traffic fall and prepare for a day when they call ‘Google Zero’, when Google stops sending traffic to websites.
For example, the Wall Street Journal recently reported on data that has demonstrated how AI overviews kill traffic to news sites. Plus one Pew Research Center Study This week showed that in a survey under 900 US Google users 18% of the approximately 69,000 searches AI overviews showed, which led to users clicking on left 8% of the time. When there was no AI summary, users clicked almost twice as much on the left, or 15% of the time.
Similar web discovered that the AI references from June to news and media websites since June 2024 rose by 770%. Some sites will naturally rank higher than others that block access to AI platforms, as the New York Times does, as a result of his lawsuit with OpenAI about the use of his articles to train his models.
In the News Media category, Yahoo led with 2.3 million AI references in June 2025, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9 m), Reuters (1.8 m), The Guardian (1.7 m), India Times (1.2 m) and Business Insider (1.0 m).
With regard to methodology, comparable Web AI references counts as web references to a domain of an AI platform such as Chatgpt, Gemini, Deepseek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude and Liner. Chatgpt dominates here, good for more than 80% of the AI references to the top 1,000 domains.
The company’s analysis has also looked at other categories that go beyond news, such as e-commerce, science and education, tech/search/social media, art and entertainment, business and others.
In e-commerce, Amazon was followed by Etsy and Ebay when it came to those sites that saw the most references, respectively at 4.5 m, 2.0 m and 1.8 m in June.
Among the top tech and social sites, Google, not surprisingly, was at the top of the list, with 53.1 million referrals in June, followed by Reddit (11.1M), Facebook (11.0M), Github (7.4M), Microsoft (5.1M), Canva (5.0M), Instagram (4.7M), LinkedIn (4.4M), Bing (3.1m), and Pinterest (2.5m).
The analysis has excluded the OpenAi website because so many of the references came from Chatgpt, which indicates its services.
In all other domains, the number 1 -site of AI references for each category YouTube (31.2m), research gate (3.6 m), Zillow (776.2K), Europa.eu (992.9k), Wikipedia (10.8m), Nih.GOV (5.2M), investment. Zara (325.6k).
