If you’ve been looking at the performance reports for your site in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) recently, you may have noticed a significant rise in referral traffic.
Referral traffic refers to visitors brought to a website by clicking a link on another website. For example, if someone is reading a blog post on another website and clicks a link that directs them to a different site, this visit would be recorded in GA4 as referral traffic.
One significant source of this referral traffic is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that answers users’ questions by gathering and synthesising information from multiple sources across the web.
ChatGPT cites its sources in its responses, often by providing clickable links. These links direct users to those websites.
This means that a website can gain additional visibility, and potentially additional traffic, through AI-generated content on ChatGPT, and not just traditional search engines such as Google or Bing.
Being cited as a source of information in ChatGPT, and getting referral traffic from it, is directly tied to your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
Good SEO not only helps your website rank higher in search engines, but it also makes your content easier for AI to find and understand. When your site meets these standards, artificial intelligence bots such as ChatGPT are more likely to reference it as a reliable source in its answers.
A recent study by Siege Media revealed that referral traffic via ChatGPT had grown by over 25.6% in a single month. In the same study, organic search traffic (traffic brought to a site via traditional search engines such as Google, Bing etc), also increased; however, this was by a smaller margin of 5.2%.
According to the study, if current growth trends continue, AI-driven traffic could surpass traditional organic search traffic within just 31 months.
This noticeable rise in referral traffic from AI chatbots indicates a shift in how users are finding information online.
As a result, it is increasingly important for online businesses to also focus on generative engine optimisation (GEO) and not just SEO.
Looking for advice on how to optimise your site for generative engines? Get in touch with the team at Engage Web today.
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