AI Is Sending Billions of Visits to the Web, but Only a Few Sites Are Getting Most of the Traffic

 As artificial intelligence becomes part of how people search for information online, it is also changing where those users go next. An analysis by OneLittleWeb found that AI sources generated 6.3 billion referred visits to 10,171 websites between July 2025 and June 2026, but the traffic was heavily concentrated among a small group of platforms.

OpenAI received the largest share, with 1.8 billion AI-referred visits, equivalent to 28.16% of the traffic measured in the analysis. Google was second with 1.3 billion visits, or 21.25%.

The figures suggest that AI is not simply replacing traditional search engines. It is also sending users back to them. Google recorded the largest increase among the top 10 destinations, gaining 929.6 million AI-referred visits during the period.

YouTube was the third-largest destination, receiving 307.8 million visits, followed by GitHub with 116.8 million. ChatGPT received 114.1 million AI-referred visits.

OneLittleWeb treats OpenAI.com and ChatGPT.com as separate domains. When the two are considered part of the same OpenAI ecosystem, however, they received about 1.91 billion AI-referred visits, or almost 30% of the measured market.

Together, Google, OpenAI and ChatGPT accounted for about half of the AI-referred traffic in the analysis.

The list also shows that AI-driven discovery is reaching beyond search and technology platforms. Facebook received 104.4 million AI-referred visits and WhatsApp 86 million.

One of the more notable destinations was the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which received 73.8 million AI-referred visits. Wikipedia received 72 million, while Reddit recorded 70.5 million.

The NIH figure is particularly interesting for health and science communicators because it suggests that authoritative research and health information sources can become destinations after people encounter information through AI.

But the data also point to a concentration problem. The top 10 websites accounted for 64.48% of the AI referral trafficmeasured by OneLittleWeb.

This means that as AI becomes another gateway to information, a relatively small number of large platforms are capturing a substantial share of the traffic generated by that new pathway.

There is also an important distinction between AI-generated answers and AI-referred traffic. The analysis measures visits that arrive at websites from AI sources. It does not measure all the times an AI system mentions a website or uses its information without sending the user to that site.

That distinction matters because one of the biggest questions around AI search is whether websites will continue to receive visitors when users increasingly get their answers directly from AI systems.

The OneLittleWeb analysis provides one indication that AI is currently creating substantial referral traffic, but it also shows that the benefits are not evenly distributed.

For publishers, researchers, health organisations and other information providers, the emerging question is therefore not simply whether people are using AI to search. It is which sources AI sends people to, and what makes those sources worth visiting after an AI-generated answer.

Source: OneLittleWeb, Most Visited Websites in the World analysis, covering July 2025–June 2026. The analysis tracks 10,171 websites and uses estimated traffic data from SEMrush, Ahrefs and Aitools.xyz.