Google, Reddit Dominate in GenAI Referrals to Tech Platforms

Reddit, Github, Canva, Samsung, and Hostinger win their categories

As AI referrals emerge as an important, emerging marketing channel, we see AI engines referring the usual suspects at the top of every web traffic ranking, with google.com at the top of the list. Yet the sites most likely to win links and clicks from ChatGPT don’t necessarily mirror overall traffic rankings. For example, Reddit beats Facebook among social networks and Hostinger tops GoDaddy in web hosting, according to Similarweb estimates for August 2025.

For any tech products company, winning a larger share of AI referrals than the competition could be very important going forward. Although smaller in volume than search traffic, AI referrals bring visitors who have already done their research and are often ready to buy. As disclosed in Similarweb’s report on The State of Ecommerce 2025, AI referrals are associated with a higher conversion rate than any other marketing channel. Based on June 2025 traffic, visits referred by AI converted to sales at 11.4%, compared with 9.3% for paid search and 5.3% for organic search.

In this report, we take a closer look at the extent to which AI tech platforms send the bulk of their referrals to other tech-centric domains, and which domains lead in categories like social networks, programming and design resource websites, consumer electronics, and web hosting.

Tech Giants Top the List

If we look at an overall ranking of top web domains according to their volume of AI Referrals, most fall into the category colloquially known as “Big Tech” – search, social media, programming, and web infrastructure. All except for Reddit and Wikipedia are owned by either Google, Facebook owner Meta Platforms, or Microsoft.

The standing of openai.com on the list is misleading because 99% of those referrals are from chatgpt.com – ChatGPT referring visitors to the resources of OpenAI, its parent company.

The top position of google.com could also be somewhat exaggerated, given Google’s core role in web infrastructure, including “log in with Google” services employed by the AI engines. Google attracted 51.7 million AI referral visits in August, according to Similarweb estimates. That number does not include referrals from gemini.google.com, which Similarweb classifies as internal to the google.com domain. Google got 27.3 million referrals from ChatGPT alone, many of them in response to questions about Google products and services or its role in setting web standards.

Google also owns youtube.com, which got 30.7 million AI referral visits in August, including 20.1 million from chatgpt.com and 6.3 million from gemini.google.com.

Similarweb classifies most of these domains as Computers, Electronics, and Technologies sites, with the exception of youtube.com (Arts and Entertainment) and wikipedia.org (Reference). For this report, we took a closer look at the rankings within key subcategories of tech.

We also used Similarweb’s AI Chatbot Traffic Tool to explore the types of prompts that lead to these referrals, particularly those where people don’t necessarily ask for the company by name (a question about Google Keep driving traffic to keep.google.com) but ask a more general question that leads the AI tool to recommend a site (“Can you suggest some color palette ideas for my design project?” driving traffic to canva.com/colors/color-palettes). Like “unbranded queries” in search, the more general questions suggest success in using content marketing and user-generated content to attract the interest of AI engines.

Reddit, Github, Canva, Samsung, and Hostinger Win Their Categories

Here are the categories we focused on, with their respective AI referral traffic leaders. After Reddit, the total volume of these referrals drops significantly for the other category leaders. These aren’t all the subcategories of tech, but they are the ones we found most interesting, with millions of AI referral visits being directed to the top sites.

To be clear, AI traffic is an interesting emerging traffic channel, but it typically accounts for less than 1% of traffic even for the websites attracting the most AI referrals.

Reddit Leads Among Social Networks for Having a Forum on Every Topic

For both search engines and AI answer platforms, Reddit’s forums (subreddits) provide a rich source of authentic user-generated content on almost any topic, including topics of intense interest for online merchants. For example, one of the landing pages with the most referral visits is reddit.com/r/FashionReps, which attracts traffic driven by prompts like “What are the best places to buy high-quality fashion replicas?” and “How can I find reviews of replica clothing items?”

Sample prompts from Similarweb’s AI Traffic Tool

Reddit’s content is so diverse that no one page attracts more than 1% of AI referral traffic.

The traffic flowing to Facebook lands on similarly diverse destinations but those pages are more likely to be related to user help topics or advertiser resources. That’s probably because more Facebook user content is private. Instagram is more likely to attract queries related to key influencers or business accounts. Some of the traffic LinkedIn gets is related to blog-like articles posted by experts in its userbase, such as one on the implications of the US government’s national debt.

GitHub tops the list for developer resources

The top domain for software developer resources is github.com, with 6.2 million AI referrals in August.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, an OpenAI partner, and uses OpenAI tech in its GitHub Copilot coding assistant, which may give it an edge. But GitHub is also an extremely important repository of open source code, downloadable resources, and discussion about software issues.

While GitHub referrals include many branded prompts about GitHub products, they also include traffic to download pages for software like a Twitch downloader.

Some of the domains listed here such as office.com are not necessarily purely programming resources, even though that’s how they are classified in Similarweb’s taxonomy. But they all outrank StackOverflow, the programming forums website often identified as a casualty of the rise of generative AI tools that summarize the wisdom to be found there. The stackoverflow.com domain appears farther down the list, with 343.2 K referral visits from AI platforms.

The ilovepdf.com domain, which appears at #3 on this list, gets traffic related to some branded prompts but also gets 8% of its traffic to pages that answer questions like “How can I reduce the size of my PDF files?” and “How can I split a PDF into separate pages?”

Canva runs away with the Graphics, Multimedia, and Web Design category

Not only does Canva (canva.com) lead the graphics and design category by a wide margin, attracting over 3.1 million AI referral visits in August, but the next most popular domain, remove.bg, is for an image background removal tool Canva also owns. A big part of Canva’s ranking is likely its Custom GPT integration with ChatGPT for access to Canva templates.

Canva attracts many visits to pages explaining its products and services, but also some to its resume templates and other design resources.

Consumer Electronics referrals mirror overall rankings

In Consumer Electronics, samsung.com and apple.com are at the top of the list, as they are in overall traffic, reflecting the breadth of Samsung and the popularity of Apple. They rank ahead of consumer electronics retailers, probably because AI links to their sites are part of answers to questions about their top selling products.

More than 10% of the AI referral traffic to bestbuy.com is driven directly to its home page, in response to prompts like “What are the current top deals on electronics at Best Buy?” The retailer also benefits from referrals to product pages, such as those for specific models of TVs and computers.

One outlier on the list, manuals. Plus, it is neither a vendor nor a retailer but a search engine and repository for tech product documentation. 

Web Hosting and Domains: AI boosts Hostinger, Wix, and Namecheap

AI engines appear to recommend Hostinger (hostinger.com) more than twice as often as any other web host or domain registrar, while wix.com and namecheap.com both also place significantly higher in AI referrals than in overall web traffic. The placement of aws.amazon.com seems more predictable, given how synonymous Amazon Web Services is with cloud computing and the number of questions about cloud software, services, and programming techniques.

The top placements for Hostinger and Wix both seem to be related to answers to questions from people seeking powerful and relatively easy to use website builder tools. Hostinger attracts many visits to pages related to its website builder, but also draws traffic to content marketing assets like a tutorial on how to build a web developer portfolio.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons Namecheap ranks ahead of the better-known domain registrar GoDaddy is that AI engines are directing people to its free logo maker app, which gets nearly 5% of the AI referral traffic. Wix benefits from a similar gambit, drawing 3.2% of its AI referral traffic to a logo creator (free to try, but with a fee required for commercial use). While logo creation might seem to be more about digital graphics than hosting, making it easy to create a logo helps these businesses position themselves as providing a complete package of services for creating a digital presence.

These tactics are not so different from those business websites use to attract search traffic. For example, Namecheap’s logo generator and other free tools also represent some of its top organic search landing pages.

Not the same as search. Not completely different.

Digital professionals are currently waging fierce debates over whether getting noticed by AI platforms is just a new twist on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or ought to be recognized as a distinct discipline, GenAI Optimization (GEO). In many cases, the winners appear to have crafted successful SEO and content strategies that happen to translate to the AI era.

Meanwhile, AI engines are picking winners and losers with the websites they choose to recommend and recommend strongly enough that users are motivated to click on links in the chat. As opposed to those they choose to ignore.

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

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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".