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Publishers are starting to see referral traffic from AI search engine Perplexity, according to data from three sources.
The New York Times, The Guardian, and Forbes are all seeing traffic referrals, despite having previously blocked Perplexity’s bots from crawling their content.
Forbes, the news site benefitting from Perplexity’s referral traffic the most, per Similarweb data, received 236,300 visits from Perplexity in August 2024, up from 10,800 in August 2023. The New York Times followed with 96,600 visits, an increase from 11,600 visits year-on-year. The Guardian saw 76,800 visits, a rise from 6,700 visits in August 2023. These news publishers were followed by India Times, BBC, and CNN.
Nearly 13% of the global traffic Perplexity’s search engine refers went to news and media sites, per Similarweb. The rest went to platforms like Google, Reddit, and adult sites.
It’s worth noting that, even in Forbes’ case, 236,300 visits is a tiny portion of its traffic. Referrals make up 3.3% of Forbes’ traffic, per Similarweb. Of total referral traffic, Perplexity is the second most significant behind Wikipedia, referring 9% of traffic, (Perplexity referral traffic is actually down by 23.3% month-over-month). Organic search (Google) makes up 75% of traffic to Forbes, while social makes up 7.11%.
“The New York Times has between 50 and 100 million visitors to our website per week. I don’t really see that number [by Perplexity] as significant,” a New York Times spokesperson told ADWEEK. “Even if Perplexity would refer to publishers, is that interrupting what would normally be a direct connection between a reader and a publisher? It can’t be assumed that it’s 100% of people unfamiliar or unaccustomed to reading The New York Times.”
In Q1 2024, Perplexity reached 15 million monthly users, per Wired, as people gradually adapt to AI-enabled search.
Publishers like The New York Times have blocked Perplexity’s bots from accessing their sites, fearing the potential for regurgitated content to undermine their revenue models. Perplexity has signed multiyear agreements with publishers like Time and Fortune as part of its Publisher Program, which aims to share ad revenue whenever their content appears alongside ads. The search engine is expected to start serving ads in Q4.