# ChatGPT’s traffic surge is good news for brands. For publishers, it’s complicated > Source: > Published: 2026-08-10 11:30:00+00:00 [OpenAI](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/openai) made a change to how [ChatGPT](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/chatgpt) links to websites in the spring, and barely anybody noticed. Starting on May 7, ChatGPT began sending considerably more traffic to websites. Referrals jumped 157% overnight and have stayed there, according to [new data](https://www.similarweb.com/corp/the-2026-generative-ai-landscape/). On the same day, OpenAI also began [rolling out advertising](https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/) in [AI answers](https://www.fastcompany.com/91523471/what-to-do-when-your-ai-answers-go-wrong), a move that had [been in the works](https://www.fastcompany.com/91472395/openai-chatgpt-advertising-television-trust) for several months. The two are related, and you can tell because of the kinds of sites that ChatGPT is linking to: homepages. Since the change, when an answer recommends a brand, it’ll often link to the company’s homepage with an in-line link—as opposed to the tiny citations that appear in footnotes or the larger cards at the bottom of the text. In-line links almost always get more clicks, because readers want additional context in the moment. So why would OpenAI make clickable links more prominent in answers at the exact moment it launches ads? The answer has implications for both advertisers and publishers, and it forces us to reexamine the narrative that the rise of [AI](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence) means the web is dead. The [zero-click future](https://www.fastcompany.com/91513019/why-breaking-news-still-wins-in-the-age-of-ai) was always an exaggeration, but the web’s place in an AI-driven economy looks different now. The dominant narrative in AI has been that as people turn to AI chatbots for answers, they’ll tend to stay on those platforms, and the web will morph from human-visited websites to machine-scraped data repositories. A recent [Similarweb report](https://www.similarweb.com/corp/the-2026-generative-ai-landscape/) counters that assumption: It shows the share of ChatGPT referral visits landing on brand homepages shot up from roughly 25% to 60% after May 7, with [other data](https://higoodie.com/blog/ai-search-traffic-report-2026/) showing ChatGPT already accounting for 63% of all AI-driven referral traffic. When visualized, the jump is pretty dramatic: The good news is that people will still click on links when they’re present, at least when they need something specific. The bad news—for publishers, anyway—is that those clicks are going to brands. If you ask ChatGPT about the latest developments in the war in Iran or which movies did well at the box office this week, you’ll rarely see in-line links. Brands get the new real estate. Publishers get the footnotes. The timing of this shift is revealing. Profound, a GEO optimization company, [published an analysis](https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/chatgpt-referrals-branded-links) pointing to the most likely reason: OpenAI is measuring clicks on in-line links to help build an ad-ranking model, which aligns with [an Adweek report](https://www.adweek.com/media/openai-chatgpt-ads-job-listing-marketing-platform/) that the company is serious about advertising infrastructure. This makes OpenAI more committed to making ads work inside AI answers than any competitor to date—more than Perplexity, which has [tried and stumbled](https://www.adweek.com/media/perplexity-pauses-new-advertising-deals-to-reassess-ambitions/), and in a totally different position from Google, which already has that infrastructure baked into everything it does. In-line links are, in effect, the new currency inside AI answers—something brands will prize as part of how audiences discover them. A new class of visitor will start arriving at websites having only encountered a brand for the first time in a ChatGPT answer. There’s an important structural wrinkle in how this works, though: the referrals go to company homepages, not product pages. Answers about specific products typically shunt users to ChatGPT’s built-in shopping experience. What gets rewarded is being *recommended as a brand*, not having a great product page. ChatGPT doesn’t recommend brands randomly or equally. [Study](https://muckrack.com/blog/what-is-ai-reading-new-insights-may) after [study](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society) shows LLMs favor journalistic content above almost everything else, including paid or advertorial content. Publishers write the stories that shape how AI systems interpret brands, which gives them a significant part to play in this emerging economy. Put simply: Brands need credible sources to say good things about them. The path to AI visibility runs through journalism and media. So how can publishers make the most of being the credibility infrastructure in this new paradigm? As I wrote in [my previous column](https://www.fastcompany.com/user/peter-pachal) on ads for bots, publishers obviously shouldn’t do anything that damages their credibility while trying to leverage it. That means maintaining the editorial independence that makes them trustworthy in the first place. But it might also mean reinvesting in service journalism in ways that target the specific brands their readers are interested in. Being a reliable guide on brand-related questions is exactly what AI engines cite, even if the in-line links remain out of reach for publishers themselves. Then there’s branded content. This route is commercial by nature, which makes the ethical standards—clear labeling above all—doubly important. But branded content provides a relatively clean way for a company to rent the credibility of a publisher. While LLMs can read commercial labels and disclosures, they also prioritize relevancy and patterns when assembling answers, and different models draw those lines differently. The volume of quality content on a high-trust domain gets noticed, regardless of how it got there. The upshot: Branded content may be in for a renaissance as LLM use continues to grow. For brands, it’s a viable way to reach audiences asking about them in AI systems. For publishers, it might be one of the only parts of their business that actually increases in value in the age of AI. The doom scenarios about the web always assumed the AI companies had no interest in sending traffic elsewhere, but they may have gotten that wrong, at least in part. An economy is taking shape inside AI answers, and it runs on credibility. That’s something journalism has always produced. The question now is whether publishers can turn it into real leverage before the window closes.