The news: Streaming and social media sites are the top beneficiaries of AI chatbot referral traffic.

• Out of 1.3 billion generative AI (genAI) search referrals in May, YouTube ranked first in traffic with nearly 40 million visits, per Similarweb.
• That’s more than the next three—Facebook, Wikipedia, and Reddit—combined.

For the first time, Similarweb is tracking chatbot referral traffic from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, and Liner.

Why this matters: Brands and marketers need to know where search traffic is heading and how best to appear in AI search results.

What chatbots are linking to:

• User-generated content (UGC). Many of the top 20 sites are social media and video platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
• Ecommerce. Two shopping sites made it into the top 10—Etsy and Amazon, though the latter’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) page, not its ecommerce platform, had most of its AI search traffic.
• Education and news. The National Institutes of Health landed at No. 8 thanks mostly to prompts related to eye health. ResearchGate made a surprise appearance at No. 13. Yahoo and Reuters made the top 30.

What’s next? “AI chatbots are becoming powerful discovery engines, steering millions to sites like YouTube, Amazon, and The Guardian—and that means marketers need to optimize for AI prompts just like they do for search,” said EMARKETER senior director of briefings Jeremy Goldman.

“The key is to create content that’s structured, trustworthy, and link-worthy because AI engines are starting to reward that with real traffic. Those who block or ignore AI might miss out, while those who embrace it are already seeing the payoff,” he said.

Our take: Focusing on what makes sites top the AI search results could help increase site visits.

• Expand knowledge-based articles, FAQs, and blog posts with educational and UGC content.
• Boost SEO with long-tail keywords that are likely to appear in prompts.
• Encourage inbound links since site authority is a factor in AI search results.

On the advertising side, targeted placements on social media and news-based sites could improve visibility and entice clicks.