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The Actual State of This Field

A shallow granular bed with small, irregular mounds; faint, unstable pathways between them embody a track with real demand, small scale, and unformed methodology
Real demand, small scale, and unformed methodology together form the basis for judging investment pace

IN ONE SENTENCE

Real demand, small volume, unsettled methodology — all three hold at once, and together they set the sensible pace of investment.

Demand is real, volume is still small, and methodology is unsettled. Three things hold simultaneously: referrals are growing fast, the absolute base is small, and outside Google the mechanisms are undisclosed. Any investment decision should rest on those three.

OUR POSITION

It is worth doing now, but on an asset-building expectation rather than a traffic-buying one. Most of the return at this stage comes from early content and entity accumulation, not from current referral volume.

01

Scale: fast growth, small base

On Similarweb's measure, AI platforms sent 1.13 billion referrals to the global top 1,000 sites in June 2025, up 357% year over year — against 191 billion from Google Search in the same period.

Cross-site work (Conductor, 13,770 domains) averages AI referrals at around 1% of total traffic. The value is in trend and structure, not in this quarter's volume.

02

Landscape: still reordering

ChatGPT's share of generative-AI web traffic fell from roughly 76% to about 53% while its own volume held flat — the category grew around it. Betting on a single platform is getting riskier.

China and the rest of the world are two ecosystems: citation sources, available measurement, even crawler identifiers differ. One plan cannot cover both.

03

Mechanism: undisclosed outside Google

Google published guidance in May 2026. OpenAI publishes only publisher-facing opt-in/opt-out material. Neither Anthropic nor Perplexity has published guidance on how content gets cited.

The consequence is an industry reverse-engineering from correlation studies, with n=1 self-reported cases everywhere. Verifying any given claim is expensive, and that is itself characteristic of this stage.

The ceiling on methodology sits here too: citations are long-tail and roughly three quarters of the weight sits off-site — owned content alone cannot reach the top.

Data behind this page

76% → 53%

ChatGPT's share of generative-AI web traffic

Source：Similarweb, June 2025 to May 2026; its own volume held flat while the category grew，2026

1.13B

Monthly AI-platform referrals to the top 1,000 sites

Source：Similarweb, via TechCrunch; up 357% YoY，2025-06

1.08%

AI referrals as a share of total site traffic

Source：Conductor, across 13,770 domains，2025

Sources

  1. [1]Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search．Google Search Central．2026-05-15

Updated 2026-08-10