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Why did ChatGPT suddenly stop sending half as much web traffic in just a few weeks?
Posted by on August 28, 2025 at 5:18 pmWhy is ChatGPT now sending 52% less referral traffic to websites—and almost exclusively citing Wikipedia, Reddit, and TechRadar? It looks like OpenAI manually tweaked the citation weighting, and now “answer-first” platforms are getting all the love while branded sites are practically invisible.
How do publishers and marketers even compete in a world where AI answers replace clicks? Drop your thoughts, theories, or horror stories below. -
1 Reply
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ChatGPT seems to be building results into its own cache for repeat questions….but once you ge4t listed, you last longer – unlike Perplexity ~~or Viagra~~
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How are you able to identify/attribute traffic from/to ChatGPT?
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Not really. I did a quick check on 6 different sites and they got more or less the same traffic from ChatGPT, with one doubling the previous month and getting close to Bing. However, this last one got less traffic from Perplexity. Not that there’s a correlation, but I just found it curious.
However, based on the sources you mention, it is possible that you were cited on subjects that require a lot of authority, or that your site was included among a group of other sites. (Note: I have no idea what to call that widget with all the sources shown like a carousel. If anyone knows, please tell.)
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What does your site have for content?
Is it “semantically aligned”?
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Maybe they are looking to make money and soon won’t give a shit about anything else?
My site seems to have about the same traffic from ChatGPT but it is ecommerce
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They don’t replace them. The days of SEO are over. Everything is gone to sites that update constantly and not just dead old information that can be cached and still be the same a year later or even a week later.
Honestly when was the last time you seen a top result for a site that hasn’t been updated in a long time.
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This is exactly why I’ve been saying that hoping for AI citations is a losing game. Instead of chasing referrals, you need to hardcode your facts directly into how AI systems (not LLMs) read your site so when they do answer questions in your space, they’re pulling from your structured data whether they cite you or not.
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