The Top 4 AI Sources of Traffic to My Web Site (the last 90 days)
AI Traffic to my Web Site Is Growing 30% Per Month (here are the top 4 sources)
The billion dollar question for us content publishers is:
Can the new AI giants be a legit traffic source to our web sites?
10-Second Summary of this Post
AI-driven traffic comes from “The Big 4”: ChatGPT (64%), Perplexity (17%), Gemini (9%) and Microsoft Bing Chat/Copilot (8%).
AI referrals = 1.03% of organic traffic, growing 30% per month → Could hit 12% by Dec 2025.
Claude (Anthropic) sends no traffic; DeepSeek & Le Chat have potential.
Publishers: Track AI traffic; AI companies: Prioritize attribution.
AI is Becoming a Web Traffic Driver
I looked at the stats for Ongig.com (“AI-based job description writing & management”) — that’s the highest traffic site (100,000+ visits/mo.) I have access to:
AI-driven organic traffic is rising fast.
The trendline is pointing straight up.
Which LLMs generate the most free traffic?
Here are the LLMs sending the most traffic to Ongig over the last 3 months. It’s a total of 2,180 sessions:
The Big 4 LLMs sending traffic are:
ChatGPT (64%) — No surprise here — they’re the highest traffic LLM. But publishers should rejoice that ChatGPT now has links (through both ChatGPT and ChatGPT+Search). Remember when they just returned an answer? With no links!?
Perplexity (17%) — They’ve included links to web sites since the beginning. It’s core to their positioning (providing answers and giving the source data).
Gemini (9%) — The only surprise here is that Google’s Gemini has quickly overtaken Microsoft’s Co-Pilot.
Bing Chat/Copilot (8%) — Microsoft is a bit harder to track. What we see in our analytics is primarily from this URL: edgeservices.bing (this seems to be primarily from Bing Chat used within the Microsoft Edge browser's sidebar. This shows up in Google Analytics as a separate traffic source than Microsoft’s Bing search engine).
Why This Matters:
For Publishers: AI-driven traffic is a free and growing organic channel—track it now.
For AI Execs: Attribution determines your relationship with content creators. Send traffic, and they'll work with you.
DeepSeek & Other Up-and-Coming AI Traffic Sources
The next largest AI sources of traffic were:
DeepSeek.ai: the hot new Chinese LLM I wrote about last week: The 14 Datasets DeepSeek Likely Used to Train Its AI (Zero Content Deals?)
Developer Tools: Blackbox.ai and Devv.ai
Why no Traffic from Anthropic’s Claude?
Some LLMs purposely don’t send traffic to Web publishers.
Anthropic’s Claude is one. They currentlyprovide text answers (with no links).
What about Mistral’s Le Chat
Le Chat (the #1 LLM in France) has the most potential for wider adoption in the EU.
Unlike ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity (all closed platforms), Le Chat is open-source and also more compliant with EU data privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR).
Le Chat first launched February 26, 2024 but lacked real-time Web search.
Then, on November 18, 2024, it added the web search feature.
But, so far, Ongig’s blog hasn’t seen a single visit.
I’ll keep an eye on it.
At This Growth Rate, AI Will Power 12% of Organic Traffic by 2025
AI Traffic Growth Projection:
30% MoM growth → at this pace, 12% of all organic traffic will be AI-driven by Dec 2025.
Current AI traffic share = just 1.03%, but surging fast.
How We Found the AI Traffic in Google Analytics
2/17/25 Update: After I published the article, some people asked me how we found the traffic from AI.
Heather at Ongig was kind enough to show that here:
A Free Analytics Tool to Measure LLM Traffic
My team at Ongig also used this free Looker Studio dashboard from Previsible.io to help see LLM traffic.
Here’s the one we used for Ongig (note: the data differs slightly from the #s we used our own Google Analytics for the final data in this article).
Previsible also has a solid article called The Rise of LLM Traffic: An AI SEO Study About the Future of Search by David Bell.
Final Takeaways
For Content Execs: If I were running a media company (wait, I am), I'd be tracking AI traffic like a hawk. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 12–24 months, some publishers see an AI rival Google in traffic.
For AI Execs: More traffic = better publisher relationships. If I were in your shoes, I'd do everything I could to send publishers traffic (or pay them a licensing fee/rev share) — See “5 Takeaways from the AI Content Licensing Deals I’m Tracking”. That’s how you get them to work with you. In my view, the AI companies that win long-term will be the ones that publishers trust.
Thanks to
at Ongig for all her help with the data in this articleThanks for reading!
Rob Kelly, Creator & Host of Media & the Machine
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