• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 3, 2025

ChatGPT continues to push referral traffic to news publisher sites, but not enough to counter declines in clicks from users who increasingly get news from AI-powered search results, according to a report released this week.

Between January 2024 and May 2025, news-related prompts in ChatGPT rose by 212%, while Google searches declined by 5%.

The change, mapped by Similarweb, began in late 2024 with ChatGPT use accelerating since January 2025. This suggests users are increasingly turning to generative AI for real-time news insights.

ChatGPT's app users have more than doubled in the last six months compared with the same period the previous year, while web visitors grew by 52%.

For news publishers and aggregators, this shift signals a need to rethink distribution and payment strategies. Some companies have already done this.

For example, on Wednesday Cloudflare released a permission-based model that blocks AI scrapers from accessing content across millions of websites that it protects -- about 24% of all sites across the internet.

It created a protocol that gives developers of bots and AI agents a standard to identify themselves. The company believes it has created a new “fundamental economic model for the web” -- a permission and payment model that will significantly shift online information services like publishers and have major implications for the advertising and digital ecosystem.

A Pay Per Crawl model will monetize content with an HTTP 402 response code, which is used for bots when payments are required.

As more users turn to GAI for real-time updates and conversational summaries, the traditional SEO-driven approach may be insufficient when it comes to capturing audience attention.

The trend highlights shifting user preferences and the growing role of AI assistants in information retrieval.

Google launched AI Overviews in May 2024, and since then the share of zero clicks -- the percentage of searches resulting in no clicks -- has steadily increased, rising from 56% to nearly 69% by May 2025.

During the same period, organic traffic to news publishers has declined, dropping from more than 2.3 billion visits at its peak to under 1.7 billion.

The data, per Similarweb, suggests that users increasingly get answers directly on the results page without clicking through to publishers.

For news organizations, this shift marks a critical point in paid and organic search. Visibility alone will longer translate into traffic, and it challenges the assumptions of what type of value companies gain in search rankings.

Similarweb suggests that AI has created a new path to headlines on publisher sites.

ChatGPT referrals to news publishers rose from under 1 million between January and May in 2024 to more than 25 million during that same time frame in 2025. Publishers such as Reuters, The New York Post, and Business Insider have benefited from the switch.

CNN, however, is absent from the referral rankings. The New York Times also is underrepresented due to restrictions on ChatGPT sourcing or linking to their content, according to Similarweb. It shows gaps in the process and what sites will benefit from the change.