OpenAI changed something small in how ChatGPT links to outside websites this spring, and it turned into a big deal. Starting May 7, the tool began linking to brand homepages far more often, right inside its answers, instead of tucking those links away as tiny footnotes. Clicks to outside websites jumped 157 percent overnight and have stayed at that higher level since, based on data from the traffic analytics firm Similarweb.
That same day, OpenAI also began expanding its test of ads inside ChatGPT answers, and that timing is not a coincidence. One AI marketing research firm tracked more than 8 million referral visits and found that daily clicks to outside sites nearly doubled overnight. The share of ChatGPT answers containing a clickable brand link also jumped, from around 5 percent to 22 percent, which is exactly the kind of click data OpenAI needs to eventually sell ads well.
Here is the part that matters for anyone running a business: the links go to your homepage, not your product pages. If someone asks ChatGPT about a specific product, the app usually pushes them into its own built-in shopping feature instead of sending them to your site. Getting recommended as a trustworthy brand now matters more than having a polished product page.
News publishers are the losers in this particular shift. Their reporting is often what teaches ChatGPT what a brand is and whether it is any good, since studies keep showing that chatbots favor real journalism over advertising and press releases when deciding what to say. But that credibility rarely turns into a click for the publisher itself, since ChatGPT keeps their citations in small footnotes that most people skip.
It is worth being skeptical about how big this actually is right now. Even with the jump, AI chatbots still send a tiny fraction of the traffic that Google search used to send before its own AI answers started keeping people from clicking at all. Separate research found that overall website traffic actually fell over the past year, with AI links making up next to nothing of what remained.
ChatGPT's own lead within AI traffic is also getting squeezed. Google's Gemini grew its referral traffic by roughly 388 percent in a recent three month stretch, while ChatGPT grew by about 52 percent over the same period. Building an ad business is also proving harder for OpenAI than it looked on paper, since Perplexity already tried selling ads and then paused new advertisers after its own sales team could not prove they worked.
Google still funds its AI spending with a search ad business that alone brings in more than 200 billion dollars a year, a level OpenAI is nowhere close to reaching. For publishers, the realistic path forward is not waiting for more clicks. It is doubling down on being the source AI trusts enough to quote, then finding paid ways to work with brands directly, such as clearly labeled sponsored content, since that credibility is now worth more to a brand than a banner ad.
For everyone else, the lesson is simpler: how your brand is talked about in real news coverage now shapes how AI recommends you, whether or not anyone ever clicks through to read the story.