Trying to rank higher on AI-powered search engines? We’ve got some bad news. According to Profound, an AI-marketing platform, referral traffic from ChatGPT is down 52%. Josh Blyskal, an employee at Profound, attributed the low results to ChatGPT’s recent strategy of “shifting towards sites that provide answers,” which has reduced long tail citations. The report comes just one month after a Similarweb study reported that “ChatGPT referrals to news sites jumped from under 1 million visits during January through May 2024 to more than 25 million in the corresponding 2025 period. ”
Meanwhile, sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and TechRadar have seen rapid citation growth. “The top 3 domains (Wikipedia, Reddit, TechRadar) combined have grown +53%, now controlling 22% of all citations,” Blyskal recently said. “That’s 1 in 5 ChatGPT citations going to just three sites.”
Why Does This Matter?
- ChatGPT’s new strategy affects your website’s ability to rank better on its search engine. If the platform is preferring to cite “answer-first” sources (Reddit and Quora), your website could potentially lose out on gaining new traffic.
- It also kills “call-to-actions.” “When someone asks ‘what’s the best CRM for startups?'” Blyskal wrote, “and a brand page says ‘Schedule a demo’ while Reddit has a thread comparing 10 options, Reddit gets cited.”
How Can You Try to Increase Your Referral Traffic on ChatGPT?
Trying to get ranked on ChatGPT is much different from trying to get ranked on Google. You’ll need to re-optimize your website’s content, from altering its structure to rethinking your schema markup. Here’s how:
- Make your content more direct. Get rid of the fluff, and give what the people are looking for: answers.
- Include comparison tables. AI-powered search engines typically include comparison pages, as it registers these additions as an “authoritative voice.”
- Use more citations and statistics to back up your content. As we wrote in our recent blog on GEO (which stands for Generative Engine Optimization), “When websites utilized these tools, they experienced a 40% increase in visibility.”
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