It was believed that LLMs like ChatGPT would disrupt search, which would lead to loss of traffic for websites, but it appears that LLMs are sending some traffic to websites of their own.
Websites have begun reporting traffic from ChatGPT in their Google Analytics consoles. We found traffic from chatgpt.com on OfficeChai on our Google Analytics.
Other websites too have begun seeing traffic from chatgpt.com on their Google Analytics screens. Videos are being shared on YouTube of people discovering Chatgpt traffic on their websites.
This is a pretty crucial development, especially for website owners. After LLMs burst onto the scene, and search engines like Google began showing direct answers to questions instead of showing them links to websites, there had been fears that these combination of factors would cause traffic to websites to fall. Y Combinator Garry Tan had said that Google traffic was down by as much as 15 percent for some companies.
But it appears that LLMs like ChatGPT are directing some traffic to websites as well. This could both be in the form of search results, which have now been enabled on ChatGPT, or even traffic from citations in LLM answers. Several AI tools like Perplexity and even ChatGPT link to their sources, and this could end up becoming a traffic source for some websites.
And AI systems sending traffic to websites could be crucial for all manner of websites. If websites stop getting traffic from search engines like Google, this could cause many of them to shut down, and could disincentivize newer websites into entering the content creation game. But AI models are ultimately trained on articles written by these websites, and AI companies have already used most of the existing data to train their models. And if websites don’t create new human-generated content, it could hamper the research efforts of AI companies to create better AI models. But if AI tools could replace the traffic that was earlier sent by Google to these websites, it could be a win-win situation for all — and one that website owners would especially appreciate.