AI references to websites still have a way to move on to the release of Google Search, but they grow quickly. According to new data from the market information provider SimilarAI platforms in June created over 1.13 billion references to the top 1,000 websites worldwide, a figure that has increased by 357% since June 2024.
However, Google Search still represents the majority of traffic on these sites, representing 191 billion references during the same period in June 2025.
A specific category of interest these days is the new and the media. Online publishers see traffic reductions and prepare for a day calling “Google Zero” when Google stops sending traffic to sites.
For example, the Wall Street Journal recently mentioned the data that showed that AI’s reviews are killing traffic on news sites. In addition, a Study of Pew Research Center From this week he found that in a survey of 900 US Google users, 18% of about 69,000 searches showed reviews of AI, which led to users by clicking 8% of the time. When there was no AI summary, users clicked the link almost twice, or 15% of the time.
The similarweb found that June’s AI references to news and media websites increased by 770% from June 2024. Some websites will naturally be classified as others that prevent access to AI platforms, as the New York Times does, as a result of its treatment with OPENAI. Her models.
In the media category, Yahoo led 2.3 million AI references in June 2025, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9 million), Reuters (1.8 million), the Guardian (1.7 million), India Times (1.0 million) and 1.0 million.
In terms of methodology, similarly counts AI references as web references to a field from an AI platform such as chatgpt, gemini, Deepseek, Grok, Purplexity, Claude and Liner. Chatgpt dominates here, representing more than 80% of AI referrals to the top 1,000 areas.
The analysis of the company also examined other categories beyond the news, such as e -commerce, science and education, technology/search/social media, arts and entertainment, businesses and others.
In e -commerce, Amazon was followed by Etsy and Ebay when it came to those locations that saw most referrals, at 4.5 m, 2.0m and 1.8m, respectively, during June.
Among the top technological and social sites, Google, was no surprise, it was at the top of the list, with 53.1 million references in June, followed by Reddit (11.1m), Facebook (11.0m), Github (7.4m), Microsoft (5.1m), Canva (5.0m) (4.4m).
The analysis excluded the Openai website because so many of its references was from ChatGPT, showing its services.
In all other areas, website no. 1 with AI references for each category included YouTube (31.2m), the Research Portal (3.6m), Zillow (776.2K), Europa.eu (992.9k), Wikipedia (10.8m), Nih.Gov (5.2m), Investing.com (1.2m), Home Depotto Dec. (1.2m) Zara (325.6k).
