Which of the top 1,000 websites get the most visits from AI chatbots, and which chatbot sends them (September 2026)

Chatbots now link to their sources, and people click those links. Similarweb tracks those clicks as a traffic channel of their own, "AI chatbots", next to organic search, social and the rest. So how big is that channel for the busiest sites on the web, which sites get the most from it, and which chatbot sends it?

On 18 October 2026 we took the Tranco list of the most popular websites (list 8PX8V), removed infrastructure host names, and looked up Similarweb's traffic estimates for the top 1,300 domains. We kept the first 1,000 that had an estimate, down to Tranco rank 1,242. All the figures below are Similarweb estimates for September 2026, the latest month it had published. They are modelled, not measured.

Five findings:

Similarweb splits each site's visits into ten channels. Across all 1,000 sites, weighted by visits, AI chatbots are the second-smallest:

Similarweb estimates, September 2026, 1,000 domains, 266.7 billion visits. "Share of all visits" adds up every site's visits, so google.com (85 billion) weighs heavily; "median site" is the middle site for that channel.

The median column tells a slightly different story from the pooled one. For the typical site, AI chatbots already send more visits than paid search, affiliates or paid social. Paid search is concentrated on a few sites: it is 0.9% of all visits but only 0.2% at the median site.

Most sites sit close to the median. 30 of the 1,000 had no AI chatbot visits at all, 437 got under 0.5%, 247 got 0.5% to 1%, 192 got 1% to 2%, 77 got 2% to 5% and 17 got 5% or more.

Two of the biggest reference and discussion sites get less than the median. Wikipedia got 0.12% of its 3.4 billion visits from AI chatbots (about 4 million) and 76% from organic search. Reddit got 0.22% (about 8.4 million) and 56% from organic search.

The 20 sites with at least 1 million monthly visits that got the biggest share of their visits from AI chatbots. We left out AI companies' own sites, which we list further down.

Similarweb estimates, September 2026. 747 of the 1,000 sites had at least 1 million visits. Rank is the order in this table, not the Tranco rank.

The pattern is clear. Most of the 20 are journals and research publishers, international bodies or government agencies: places that publish the facts and studies an answer rests on. They also get a lot of organic search traffic, between 34% and 55%, so chatbot visits come on top of strong search, not instead of it. stripe.com is the exception: little organic search, and Grok ranked as its top AI referrer.

nih.gov is the only site on both lists. At 5.5% of 177 million visits, it got about 9.7 million visits from AI chatbots, the 16th most of any site in the sample.

In raw numbers, the biggest sites win. google.com gets only 0.6% of its visits from AI chatbots, but 0.6% of 85 billion is about 511 million, 37% of every AI chatbot visit in the sample.

AI chatbot visits = the site's estimated September visits × its AI chatbot share, both from Similarweb. The top 20 add up to 70.1% of the 1.37 billion AI chatbot visits in the sample.

The chatbot companies send each other plenty of visits. chatgpt.com got about 62 million visits from other chatbots, with Gemini ranked first. claude.ai got about 22 million, with ChatGPT ranked first. openai.com got 21.5% of its visits from chatbots, with ChatGPT ranked first.

Similarweb ranks the chatbots that send visits to a site, but it publishes no visit count for each one. So we can count where each chatbot ranks first, not how many visits it sends. 793 of the 1,000 sites had a ranking.

| Chatbot | Ranked first | Listed at all |

|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 718 (90.5%) | 783 (98.7%) | 
| Gemini | 41 (5.2%) | 679 (85.6%) | 
| Claude | 14 (1.8%) | 558 (70.4%) | 
| Perplexity | 13 (1.6%) | 593 (74.8%) | 
| Grok | 3 (0.4%) | 200 (25.2%) | 
| Copilot | 2 (0.3%) | 248 (31.3%) | 
| DeepSeek | 2 (0.3%) | 141 (17.8%) | 

Similarweb's ranking of AI referrers, September 2026, 793 sites.

ChatGPT ranks ahead of Gemini at 94% of the sites that list both. Gemini in turn ranks ahead of Perplexity at 85% and ahead of Claude at 87%. Perplexity ranks ahead of Claude at 60% of the sites that list both. ChatGPT came first in every category with at least 15 sites, at between 85% and 98% of them.

The exceptions follow a pattern:

.ru sites with a ranking, including dzen.ru, vk.ru and avito.ru. Grouped by Similarweb's top-level category (only categories with at least 15 sites):

Similarweb estimates, September 2026. "From AI chatbots" adds up the category's visits. 26 sites had no category and 82 sat in smaller categories; they count in the totals above but not in this table.

Government and science sites get roughly twice the average share; news, entertainment and games about half. News is the starkest: news sites get 78 visits from organic search for every visit from a chatbot, against 29 for government sites.

We kept these out of the share ranking because a chatbot linking to its own maker answers a different question. For the record:

Similarweb estimates, September 2026. The sample also had one more AI-branded domain, chatgpt.site (7.93%), which we left out of the rankings for the same reason.

8PX8V`` gstatic.com and akamaiedge.net), the same list as our .arpa names, and turkiye.gov.tr, which our tool wrongly reduced to gov.tr. The first 1,000 domains with an estimate, down to Tranco rank 1,242, are the sample. Source: Tranco list 8PX8V (tranco-list.eu); traffic estimates by Similarweb for September 2026, collected by locaihost data on 18 October 2026.

Want to know what the chatbots say about your business? Our free AI answer check asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude the questions your customers ask and shows whether you come up.

Want these numbers for your own list of sites? The Website Traffic Checker on Apify returns the same fields for any list of domains: monthly visits, the full channel split, AI chatbot visits and which chatbots send them. It costs $0.70 per 1,000 domains.