AI Referrals

When you open a website, you may have landed there in various ways. Maybe you typed in the address, maybe you clicked on a search result. Website operators track these paths because their advertising revenue depends on them. A visitor who comes via a link on another site is called, in technical terms, a referral. AI referrals are exactly such visitors, except they come from a chat program with artificial intelligence. You ask a question there, get an answer in full sentences, and that answer contains a link to a website.

What media outlets and shops depend on

Many news sites, blogs, and advice portals live off clicks. The more people visit the site, the more ads get seen and the more money flows in. For years, a large share of these visitors came from Google. A text was written so that it would rank high in a search, and the clicks followed.

Chat programs like ChatGPT are changing this calculation. They summarize content from the web and deliver the answer directly. The user learns what they wanted to know without opening the source. Experts speak of zero-click answers, meaning answers without a click. For the operator of the source, this means: their work is being used, but they earn nothing from it.

AI referrals are what remains. They are growing quickly in percentage terms, but are absolutely very small. According to evaluations by analytics firms, only a few percent of visits to typical news sites come from AI tools, often under two percent. The loss in classic search is usually greater than the gain here. This exact discrepancy is the reason why publishers are going to court or signing licensing deals with AI companies.

How a chatbot arrives at the link

A chatbot does not automatically know current websites. Its knowledge comes from a training phase that was completed at some point. For current questions, it therefore starts a real web search during the conversation. This process is called retrieval. The bot loads a few pages, reads them, and builds its answer from them.

The pages it uses in doing so are cited as sources. These source citations are clickable, and a click on them generates the AI referral. The browser passes along where the visitor came from when the page opens. That’s why the site operator can see in their analytics program that the visit came from an AI service.

A common misconception is that any mention of a name already counts as a referral. Only the actual click counts. If a brand is mentioned in the answer but not clicked, visibility is created without a visitor. Companies therefore try to get mentioned in such answers in the first place. For this, the term Generative Engine Optimization has become established, echoing the old term search engine optimization.

AI referrals in quarterly reports and analytics tools

The term appears mainly in the business reports of media companies and online retailers. There, it is explained how visitor numbers are shifting. Even stock analysts now specifically ask about the share of AI referrals. Declining search clicks combined with tiny AI referrals at the same time are a warning sign for the business model.

Anyone running their own site will find the number in analytics programs like Google Analytics or Matomo. Entries such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai appear there in the list of referral sources. For online shops, it’s additionally interesting that these visitors buy something above average often. They’ve already clarified their question in the chat and arrive with a clear intent.

In everyday life, you encounter this matter from the other side. Whenever you click on a source below an AI answer, you generate an AI referral yourself. And when you don’t, even though the answer originated from a newspaper article, you see the publishers' problem in its purest form.