AI sources like ChatGPT account for less than 1% of publishers’ pageviews, Chartbeat says

People are happy to ask AI agents like ChatGPT and Claude questions. But when they get the answers, they’re rarely clicking through to any links the AI platforms provide, according to a new report from analytics platform Chartbeat.

Could AI sources like ChatGPT and Perplexity be making up the referral traffic search is losing? Not yet. ChatGPT has increased more than 200% in pageviews year-over-year, but when we look at the percentage of pageviews coming from AI platforms in the Chartbeat network, we see that chatbots still account for less than 1% of pageviews.

(I was curious so I looked at Nieman Lab’s Chartbeat data and found that over the last year, AI sources — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity — accounted for 0.7% of our pageviews.)

Some topics lead AI users to click more than others, Chartbeat says. Home and garden sites benefit the most from LLM pageviews; news and media sites, not so much. From the report:

News and Media sites receive the highest total pageviews from AI platforms, but the lowest engagement per individual article. This suggests AI is surfacing many different news articles for factchecking and context, but readers aren’t staying to explore — they’re getting their answer and leaving.

The traffic outlook for publishers “isn’t as dire as other reports would have you believe,” the report notes. Chartbeat says that publishers’ pageviews in 2025 were down about 6% from 2024, “well within the range of normal year-to-year fluctuation.” (2024 may have been a particularly newsy year, with major elections taking place around the world.)

The makeup of publisher’ traffic, though, has changed. “When we break down traffic by channel, the majority have seen stable traffic levels over the past two years with the exception of one: search,” the report notes. “Pageviews from Google Search fell 34% from December 2024 to December 2025 and pageviews from Google Discover fell 16% during the same timeframe.” Small publishers were particularly affected by the declines in search traffic:

Chartbeat suggests that publishers pay attention to internal traffic — “traffic that arrived to a page via another page on the same site.” Internal traffic “was already the largest source of pageviews for News and Media sites, and it’s slowly taking a larger piece of the pie, climbing from about 38% of pageviews in 2024 to about 41% since November 2025.”

From the report:

Internal traffic is your most controllable growth lever. As internal traffic climbs from 38% to 41% of total pageviews, the message is clear: your ability to keep readers engaged once they arrive matters more than ever. Invest in recirculation strategies like related content modules, compelling homepage curation, and newsletter sign-ups that bring readers back to your site directly.

You can request the full report here.