Tools & Platforms
AI referrals to top websites were up 357% year-over-year in June, reaching 1.13B
AI referrals to websites still have a way to go to catch up to the traffic that Google Search provides, but they’re growing quickly. According to new data from market intelligence provider Similarweb, AI platforms in June generated over 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites globally, a figure that’s up 357% since June 2024.
However, Google Search still accounts for the majority of traffic to these sites, accounting for 191 billion referrals during the same period of June 2025.
One particular category of interest these days is news and media. Online publishers are seeing traffic declines and are preparing for a day they’re calling “Google Zero,” when Google stops sending traffic to websites.
For instance, The Wall Street Journal recently reported on data that showed how AI overviews were killing traffic to news sites. Plus, a Pew Research Center study out this week found that in a survey of 900 U.S. Google users, 18% of some 69,000 searches showed AI Overviews, which led to users clicking links 8% of the time. When there was no AI summary, users clicked links nearly twice as much, or 15% of the time.
Similarweb found that June’s AI referrals to news and media websites were up 770% since June 2024. Some sites will naturally rank higher than others that are blocking access to AI platforms, as The New York Times does, as a result of its lawsuit with OpenAI over the use of its articles to train its models.
In the news media category, Yahoo led with 2.3 million AI referrals in June 2025, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9M), Reuters (1.8M), The Guardian (1.7M), India Times (1.2M), and Business Insider (1.0M).
In terms of methodology, Similarweb counts AI referrals as web referrals to a domain from an AI platform like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Liner. ChatGPT dominates here, accounting for more than 80% of the AI referrals to the top 1,000 domains.
The company’s analysis also looked at other categories beyond news, like e-commerce, science and education, tech/search/social media, arts and entertainment, business, and others.
In e-commerce, Amazon was followed by Etsy and eBay when it came to those sites seeing the most referrals, at 4.5M, 2.0M, and 1.8M, respectively, during 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 excluded the OpenAI website because so many of its referrals were from ChatGPT, pointing to its services.
Across all other domains, the No. 1 site by AI referrals for each category included YouTube (31.2M), Research Gate (3.6M), Zillow (776.2K), Europa.eu (992.9K), Wikipedia (10.8M), NIH.gov (5.2M), Investing.com (1.2M), Home Depot (1.2M), Kayak (456.5K), and Zara (325.6K).
Clorox’s lawsuit cites transcripts of help desk calls as evidence of Cognizant’s negligence, but what if those calls been captured, transcribed, and analyzed to send real-time alerts to Clorox management? Could the problem behavior have been discovered early enough to thwart the breach?
Here, generative AI could have a significant impact, as it delivers the capability to capture information from a wide range of communication channels — potentially actions as well via video — and analyze for deviations from what a company has been contracted to deliver. This could deliver near-real-time alerts regarding problematic behavior in a way that could spur a rethinking of the SLA as it is currently practiced.
“This is flipping the whole idea of SLA,” said Kevin Hall, CIO for the Westconsin Credit Union, which has 129,000 members throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota. “You can now have quality of service rather than just performance metrics.”
AI provides a technique to extract value from this untapped resource, said Ben Kus, chief technology officer at Box. To use the widely scattered data properly requires preparation, organization, and interpretation to make sure it is applied accurately, Kus said.
Box Extract uses reasoning to dig deep and extract relevant information. The AI technology ingests the data, reasons and extracts context, matches patterns, reorganizes the information by placing it in fields, and then draws correlations from the new structure. In a way, it restructures unstructured data with smarter analysis by AI.
“Unstructured data is cool again. All of a sudden it’s not just about making it available in the cloud, securing it, or collaboration, but it’s about doing all that and AI,” Kus said.
Despite short-term stock pressure, CoreWeave remains positioned to meet overwhelming AI compute demand, supporting long-term optimism in the sector.
Nvidia-backed CoreWeave says peak AI investment is still far off, as demand for compute capacity from OpenAI, hyperscalers, enterprises, and governments continues to surge. CEO Michael Intrator said CoreWeave is rapidly scaling to meet soaring global GPU demand.
Since the IPO lockup expiry, insider stock sales have added to the downward pressure.
Intrator defended the company’s strategy, describing debt as the most efficient way to fund growth. Analysts warn CoreWeave shares could stay volatile, though strong AI infrastructure demand supports long-term optimism.
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