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.
Image Credits:Similarweb
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.
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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.
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