Credit: Levart_Photographer on Unsplash ChatGPT sent 95.1% of the traffic that AI chatbots referred to websites in August, its highest share this year, according to new data from BrightEdge. The search marketing company said referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 101% between January and August. Gemini came second in August with 2.4%, BrightEdge said. Perplexity had 1.1% and Claude 0.8%.
ChatGPT sent about 22 times as much traffic as the three combined. A strong August ChatGPT’s referral traffic rose 36% in August alone, its biggest monthly jump of the year. Gemini grew 1% over the same month, while Claude fell 15% and Perplexity 17%, according to BrightEdge. AI tools still send far fewer visitors to websites than search engines do.
But total referral traffic from AI platforms has grown about 73% in less than a year, the company said. “What stands out now is that ChatGPT isn’t simply taking that share back. It is also sending substantially more users to the web than it was at the beginning of the year,” said Jim Yu, BrightEdge’s chief executive and co-founder. BrightEdge linked the rebound to OpenAI’s push to improve ChatGPT after Sam Altman declared a “code red” in December. Early this year, its data showed users switching quickly to whichever chatbot looked most advanced.
A lead on other measures too ChatGPT’s lead shows up in BrightEdge’s other data. In June, the company found that OpenAI accounted for 96% of live AI agent activity on the web, meaning visits AI makes on a user’s behalf. OpenAI also made about half of the visits AI crawlers make to train models and build search indexes. BrightEdge also found that AI agents now make about 88 requests for every 100 visits from ordinary search.
Other trackers have seen a more crowded market. Similarweb found in July that AI search is fragmenting across more assistants. Gemini reached a billion monthly users in August, and ChatGPT hit that mark in June. BrightEdge sells tools that help brands track how they appear in ChatGPT and other AI engines.
Its earlier research found that Google’s AI cited Facebook in 19.5 million answers.
