Josh Blyskal of Profound, who examined over 1 billion ChatGPT citations and 1 million referral visits from a sample of websites across all industries, reports that ChatGPT referral traffic to websites has decreased by 52% since July 21.
By the figures. Among the main conclusions are:
- Since July 23, Reddit citations have increased by 87%, surpassing 10% of all ChatGPT citations.
- Wikipedia gained about 13% of the citation share, a 62% increase from its July low.
- In only one month, the top three websites—Wikipedia, Reddit, and TechRadar—account for 22% of all citations, a 53% increase.
Why we are concerned. As branded websites lose prominence and millions of potential referral clicks, ChatGPT appears to be favoring a small number of “answer-first” providers.
what is taking place. This isn’t a GPT-5 impact, according to Blyskal (GPT-5 debuted Aug. 7). It appears that OpenAI actively reweighted its retrieval algorithm to favor helpful responses, as evidenced by ChatGPT’s citation consolidation that started weeks earlier.
The whole view. From Blyskal’s LinkedIn post, some conclusions can be drawn:
Conversion-focused branded content, like “Schedule a demo,” is being ignored.
Reddit, Wikipedia, and other answer-first websites automatically prevail since they respond to user inquiries directly.
Blyskal noted, “For brands willing to switch from conversion first to answer first content, the citation opportunity is massive.”
bottom line. Large fluctuations in traffic can be caused by OpenAI’s citation experiments. Brands that don’t provide real answers could be squeezed out of ChatGPT answers.