Could AI chatbots’ explosive growth soon become a source of audience and revenue for publishers?

Although the audiences generated by services like ChatGPT and Claude are still minimal, some publishers are closely following this trend, which could prove profitable in the future

The way we search for news is changing quickly. A few years ago, you would have automatically “Google it” your request or question. For immediate, conversational responses without the need for scrolling, clicking, or blue links, billions of people are now relying on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini.

A research study made by OneLittleWeb found that the top 10 AI chatbots accumulated 55.5 billion visits between April 2024 and March 2025, compared to the 1,863 billion visits recorded by search engines over the same period. Even if it’s still low, we can see the growth of chatbots over the past year: +124%, compared to +5.6% for search engines.

First results

Before integrating its source-linking SearchGPT search engine into ChatGPT at the end of October and now making it accessible to all users, OpenAI started testing it in July of last year. On the other hand, Perplexity has consistently incorporated connections to websites into its platform responses.

Publishers can choose to block access to their pages to all AI related robots – like The New York Times did – but on the contrary, when barriers are lifted, chatbots can lead to web pages.

The Atlantic – OpenAI partner – said it noted a “significant” increase in traffic from ChatGPT in recent months, with an increase in referrals to the site from chatbots of more than 80% between December 2024 and January 2025. Still, the American magazine counted 186,000 visits from ChatGPT in January 2025, compared to 8.4 million from search engines, largely via Google.

Agreements with AI giants

Faced with an ever-increasing use of chatbots, more and more European media are deciding to make agreements with AI companies. The Guardian, for example, announced an agreement with OpenAI last February, saying that this “approach to AI continues as the Guardian Media Group explores agreements with both existing and emerging businesses to ensure fair compensation and attribution for its journalism.”

The biggest French daily newspaper, Le Monde, also made a deal with OpenAI in March 2024, allowing ChatGPT's parent company to “use the Le Monde corpus as one of the major references to establish and make its responses more reliable [and] provides that references to Le Monde articles are highlighted and that they are systematically made with a logo, a hyperlink, and the title of the article(s) used as references.”

However, smaller publishers may struggle to secure deals. “For local or smaller outlets it’s more difficult. They don’t have that option because they don’t have the same financial resources or the same level of talent and knowledge within the company,” said Clara Soteras, SEO for News Publishers Consultant, who adds that they must develop strategies. “They need to be strategic about where to invest and try to create editorial solutions and products that help build loyalty among users and niche or local audiences – because the era of mass audiences and pageviews is ending.”

Develop strategies

Even though publishers are getting more and more traffic from AI platforms, many of them don't find that traffic to be all that significant for now when compared to other referral networks. But in the future, they could play a bigger role.

It is therefore important that publishers understand how ChatGPT works and optimise their content to be more easily understood and used by AI. One of the biggest pieces of advice is to prioritise timeliness and quality of content. Chatbots seem in fact to prioritise content that is rich in information, well-structured, and sourced from reliable sources.

“Some publishers choose to automate content and publish large volumes of articles, but that’s not a real solution because they don't want content of that quality,” explained Soteras, which says that in addition to having to produce quality content that could answer users' questions about chatbots, publishers should also implement an SEO strategy. “SEO is no longer just SEO. Now SEO is brand, product, visibility, and topical authority. So the key is integrating this into newsrooms to automate low-value tasks for journalists, allowing them to focus more on analysis.”

By using keywords or improving the SEO of these contents, they will appear in the first search results of chatbots and should therefore attract more visitors. This is called GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) which teaches AI to recognise, trust and recommend your content in real-time conversations.

Another avenue for media outlets to explore is creating their own chatbots on their websites. One example is the Financial Times, which released its first generative AI feature for subscribers earlier this year. The tool, available in beta, allows users to ask any question and receive a response using FT content published over the last two decades.

“One of the key utilities for news organisations with chatbots is that they provide direct evidence of what their users want to know. This is a very helpful indicator when shaping the production of content, even if the actual traffic from them is relatively low. It sends a signal to subscribers that you are trying to enhance the value of the service you offer,” said Charlie Beckett, director of Polis and the JournalismAI project at the London School of Economics.

They could therefore also be used as a way to increase subscriptions, and therefore income, provided that they provide real added value. “The bottom line is that in the future, if you don't provide a decent chatbot interface, then people are much less likely to come to you than ChatGPT or Google's search Overviews.”

Source of the cover photo: MagicPattern via Unsplash

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