ChatGPT is responsible for almost all the traffic AI chatbots send to websites.
According to new data from search marketing firm BrightEdge, ChatGPT accounted for 95.1% of AI referral traffic to websites in August, its highest share of the year. Referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 101% between January and August, BrightEdge said. Google's Gemini finished a distant second with just 2.4% of the referral share, followed by Perplexity at 1.1% and Anthropic's Claude at 0.8%.
The split matters because publishers and SEO teams are scrambling to rewrite their playbooks for an AI-driven web, and this data says that playbook has one main audience. Optimizing for how ChatGPT surfaces and cites content isn't one strategy among several right now - for referral purposes, it's close to the only one that counts.
Worth remembering: referral share measures how often a chatbot sends someone out to click a link, not how many people use it. A model that keeps answers self-contained, like Gemini folded into Google Search, can have huge usage and still barely register here.