AI Referral Traffic Winners By Industry

Knowing how to attract referrals from AI Platforms is becoming more important. Here’s who is winning so far in news, entertainment, ecommerce, lifestyle brands, and more.

Web traffic patterns are changing as more consumers shift their attention from Google search to generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT and Google’s own Gemini. At the same time, Google is also incorporating generative AI features into the core search experience. ChatGPT has added a search functionality that means it provides more links to other websites, in addition to AI answers to prompts.

As publishers, ecommerce companies, and web businesses of all sorts seek to adapt, Similarweb has incorporated AI Traffic tracker and AI Brand Visibility tools into its platform. We have also been working with media organizations seeking to understand the shift, producing Similarweb estimates of traffic to the top 1,000 websites worldwide that is the basis for this report. Excerpts from this report appeared in TechCrunch (AI referrals to top websites were up 357% year-over-year in June, reaching 1.13B).

Since the domains on the list of top websites getting traffic from AI chatbots are the giants that tend to be at the top of every website ranking, here we’re giving more detail on the breakdown by industry categories.

Summarize with ChatGPT | Google AI | Perplexity | Grok

Key takeaways

• Overall, Similarweb estimates that AI Platforms generated over 1.13 billion referral visits in June 2025. A big number, unless you compare it to the 191 billion referrals from Google search.
• While the numbers are smaller, AI referrals are growing rapidly and growing in importance. In June, AI referrals were up 357% from June 2024.
• June’s referrals to news and media websites were up 770% from June 2024. That’s one example where the “winners” tend to rank higher if they’re not actively blocking access from AI platforms, as, for example, the New York Times is amid a lawsuit against ChatGPT owner OpenAI alleging improper use of its articles.

In the charts below, the AI Referrals column includes all web referrals to a given domain from AI Platforms, including ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Liner. On average, ChatGPT accounted for more than 80% of those referrals to the top 1,000 domains covered in this analysis, which is why we’re showing ChatGPT Referrals in a separate column.

Here is an overview of the domains ranked highest across several key categories of the digital economy.

AI Referral Traffic Winners by Category

This analysis is organized around the pre-defined major categories in Similarweb’s platform, with minor adjustments.

Yahoo! and Yahoo! Japan are at the top of the News & Media rankings, but Yahoo is also a sprawling internet portal from the early days of the web. The pure media company that ranks highest is reuters.com, with 1.78 million AI referral visits in June.

We excluded referrals to the website of ChatGPT creator OpenAI (openai.com) from the Tech, Search, and Social category because so many of them appeared to be ChatGPT referrals to the company’s other basic services.

Tech, Search, and Social Media

Google is at the top of the list, and not just because of referrals from its own AI platforms. ChatGPT also sends google.com a healthy share of its referrals. With its strong user-generated content, Reddit (reddit.com) ranks high for AI referrals as it does for search. Github likely owes its place on the list to answers to technical questions, including access to open source code.

Ecommerce and Shopping

Ecommerce companies have spent years optimizing their product listings to generate search clicks and now must figure out how to attract AI referrals as well. It’s not surprising that Amazon is at the top of the list, although beyond retail the traffic total here includes references to its businesses outside of retail, such as its Amazon Web Services cloud computing.

Several additional online sellers are listed in the Home and Garden and Lifestyle Brands categories below.

Arts and Entertainment

Chatbots often include references to the wealth of instructional content on any topic at YouTube. Several music, art, podcast, streaming services attract a smaller slice of the pie, as does npr.org.

News and Media

Yahoo leads in referrals to news and media content, followed by Reuters, The Guardian, India Times, and Business Insider.

Science and Education

In addition to Research Gate, a portal providing access to scientific research, AI platforms send traffic to the online education sites Coursera and Udemy and to universities like MIT and Cambridge. Several of these sites could just as easily be classified as Reference (see below).

Business and Consumer Services

Real estate websites top the Business and Consumer Services category, including zillow.com with 776.2K AI referrals, followed by redfin.com, apartments.com, homes.com, and realtor.com. Other traffic winners include the business-building services from liftoff.io and shopify.com.

Law and Government

The europa.eu website used for a variety of European Union government services leads the Law and Government category, followed by a core government domain for the UK. The US tax authority, the Internal Revenue Service, and the US State Department also appear on this list.

Reference

Wikipedia, the digital encyclopedia that has been making AI platforms smarter for years (helping IBM Watson win the game show Jeopardy in 2011) ranks #6 among all websites getting referrals for AI platforms and is #1 in the Reference category.

Health

The US government’s National Institutes of Health website tops the list of websites AI platforms send traffic to. Major hospitals like mayoclinic.org and clevelandclinic.org also rank high, as do medical reference services like healthline.com and webmd.com.

Finance

The financial news and reference site investing.com leads the Finance category, and several of the other leaders here are financial publications. Intuit, the maker of Quicken and QuickBooks, scores a spot in the top 10, as does international financial transfers firm Wise (wise.com) and the brokerage Charles Schwab (schwab.com).

Home and Garden

The hardware retailer Home Depot (homedepot.com) enjoyed 1.2 million AI referrals in June, and its Canadian business unit also appears in the top 10.

Travel and Tourism

Kayak (kayak.com) leads in Travel and Tourism, with 456.5K AI referrals in June, closely followed by the lesser-known Rome2Rio (rome2rio.com) travel information aggregator with 412.4K. Airbnb (airbnb.com) scored 295.1K visits in June, ahead of booking.com with 293.7K.

Lifestyle Brands

In the Lifestyle category, which includes apparel fashion retailers and direct-to-consumer websites, Zara (zara.com) led in June, with 325.6K AI referrals, followed by Shein (shein.com) at 182.9K.

The Similarweb Press Office can pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

Disclaimer: All names, brands, trademarks, and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The data, reports, and other materials provided or made available by Similarweb consist of or include estimated metrics and digital insights generated by Similarweb using its proprietary algorithms, based on information collected by Similarweb from multiple sources using its advanced data methodologies. Similarweb shall not be responsible for the accuracy of such data, reports, and materials and shall have no liability for any decision by any third party based in whole or in part on such data, reports, and materials.

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".