ChatGPT Drives 95% of AI Referral Traffic to Websites, BrightEdge Data Shows

ChatGPT accounted for 95.1% of the web traffic referred by artificial intelligence chatbots in August, marking its highest monthly share of the year, according to research from search marketing platform BrightEdge reported by The Next Web (https://thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt-ai-referral-traffic-95-percent-brightedge). BrightEdge found that referral traffic originating from ChatGPT increased by 101% between January and August.

Competing conversational AI platforms trailed significantly. Google’s Gemini ranked second in August with a 2.4% share of AI-driven referrals, followed by Perplexity at 1.1% and Anthropic’s Claude at 0.8%. In total, ChatGPT delivered roughly 22 times as much referral traffic as those three competitors combined.

August showed diverging momentum across the platforms. Referral volume from ChatGPT rose 36% during the month, its largest single-month increase of the year. Over the same period, Gemini referral traffic grew by 1%, while Claude fell 15% and Perplexity dropped 17%.

While AI tools still deliver substantially fewer visitors to websites than traditional search engines, aggregate referral traffic across AI platforms has expanded approximately 73% in less than a year, according to BrightEdge.

“What stands out now is that ChatGPT isn’t simply taking that share back. It is also sending substantially more users to the web than it was at the beginning of the year,” said Jim Yu, chief executive and co-founder of BrightEdge. BrightEdge linked the rebound to OpenAI’s focus on improving ChatGPT after Chief Executive Sam Altman declared an internal “code red” in December.

The referral figures mirror other web activity tracked by BrightEdge. In June, the firm calculated that OpenAI accounted for 96% of live AI agent activity on the web—defined as automated visits made on a user's behalf—and roughly half of all crawler visits conducted to train models and build search indexes. BrightEdge also found that AI agents now generate about 88 requests for every 100 visits coming from standard search.

Other market measurement firms have noted different trends. Similarweb reported in July that AI search activity was fragmenting across a wider range of assistants. On overall user reach, ChatGPT crossed one billion monthly active users in June, while Gemini reached the one-billion user milestone in August.

BrightEdge, which sells software helping brands monitor their visibility in ChatGPT and other AI search systems, noted in separate research that Google’s AI features cited Facebook in 19.5 million answers.