A recent ChatGPT update might have had major implications on your AI traffic, but it’s largely gone under the radar, says Calibre + Candor’s Marco Zdrenka.
If your AI referral traffic suddenly went up recently, you probably put it down to more people using AI. You wouldn’t be alone in that thinking, as many marketers made the same assumption. After all, AI traffic is undeniably continually trending upwards.
However, the cause is probably a ChatGPT roll-out in May which was launched to market entirely unannounced.
What exactly happened?
OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT update on May 7, where it started linking brand names directly to their website homepages, in line with its answer to searches. This meant that suddenly users could click through to a website’s homepage right from where they were in ChatGPT. While ChatGPT has always sent some referral traffic, it was minimal, because users needed to dig through citation footnotes just to find a link and click to the site from there (and, as you can imagine, most people didn’t).
At Calibre + Candor, we saw a noticeable jump in referral traffic coming from ChatGPT across many of our clients’ websites. For one client, referral traffic from ChatGPT increased 207%, and homepage clicks from ChatGPT specifically were up 681%. Other clients had smaller changes, but across the board there was an uplift in both traffic and homepage clicks. These higher levels have held steady since, so it was certainly a significant development.
…and it wasn’t just us
One study looking at more than 100,000 websites found ChatGPT’s referral share increased by 36% in one month alone. AI referral traffic only represents a small proportion of total traffic, but that’s the highest change in its history. Before this, ChatGPT referral traffic had been relatively stagnant this year.
Why has no one talked about it?
If you’re wondering why such a major shift hasn’t really been talked about, it’s because OpenAI simply never announced it. OpenAI are constantly making changes to their platform, so they won’t necessarily always announce all of them. Some people also suspect it may be OpenAI’s attempt to get CTR numbers up for when they fully launch paid ads on the platform.
What does this mean for marketers?
You can now see a closer relationship between showing up in ChatGPT and people landing on your website. Until now, AI visibility has mostly been about brand awareness, as it was difficult to measure any direct return. A person might research a product or service on ChatGPT, then go and search the brand directly on Google, so you would never actually see that referral traffic. This update, however, makes the connection more visible.
For a while. the assumption has been that AI would answer everything so well that nobody would ever need to click through to a website. What we are seeing instead is that AI is becoming a way for people to discover brands and then visit them directly.
It is a different kind of traffic to what we have traditionally optimised for, but it is real and, based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like it is here to stay.
This story is from NZ Marketing magazine issue 88, Sept-Nov 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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