• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 30, 2025

ChatGPT gets plenty of bad press in the media, given OpenAI’s alleged content scraping and the resulting lawsuits. Isn’t there anything good to say about it? 

Well, a few things, judging by The Impact of Generative AI: Publishers, a recent study by competitive intelligence platform Similarweb. 

For one thing, ChatGPT’s news-related prompts have grown by 212% from January 24, 2024 to May 2025, accelerating greatly after January of this year. In contrast,  the equivalent Google searches fell by 5% from January 2024 to May 2025. 

Overall ChatGPT referral traffic grew by 25.2 million from January to May of this year, versus 1 million in the same period of 2024.

Politics is its fastest-rising news topic, showing over 600% growth since January 2024. It is not the biggest subject, but its growth outpaces that if the stock market, finance, sports and weather.  

The top 10 news sites to benefit are: 

1. reuters.com—8.9% 
2. nypost.com—7.1%
3. businessinsider.com—6.5%
4. theguardian.com—5.9%
5. wsj.com—4.8%
6. people.com—3.7%
7. forbes.com—3.6%
8. nytimes.com—3.1% 
9. sustainability-times.com—2.3%
10. time.com—2.2%

These are the shares of all new-related prompts on ChatGPT by topic:

• Stocks—33%
• Finance—21%
• Sports—17%
• Weather—15% 
• Economy—13%
• Politics—12%
• Tariffs—11%
• Climate—9%
• Crisis—8% 
• Inflation—5% 
• Covid—5%

Meanwhile, here is another update from Similarweb, the top 10 news websites in the US in May, followed by growth YoY:  

1. nytimes.com—444.9 million (-8%)
2. cnn.com—311.7 million (-28%)
3. foxnews.com—233.2 million (-24%) 
4. msn.com—183.1 million (-20%
5. people.com—157.3 million (+4%)
6. finance.yahoo.com—141.13 million (-11%)
7. nypost.com—115 million (-27%) 
8. news.google—111.5-5% million (-5%)
9. usatoday.com—109.5 million (-27%)
10. bbb.com—107 million (+6%)