Insights from 17 months of clickstream data

ChatGPT is now a standard part of how people use the web, as one piece of a complex, interconnected search journey. 

We dug into 17 months of clickstream data to map how ChatGPT usage is changing, how referral traffic is growing, and where that traffic goes. 

If you’re a marketer, understanding how your audience uses ChatGPT and where it exists in this buyer journey is critical for understanding how best to reach them. 

Key takeaways

• Outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT to the rest of the web grew 206% in 2025.
• Over 30% of all referral traffic from ChatGPT goes to 10 domains. And over 20% goes to Google.
• ChatGPT enables its search feature on just 34.5% of queries as of February 2026 — down from 46% in late 2024 — meaning most responses still rely on training data alone.
• Users are asking more prompts per session. After 12 months of flat engagement, average queries per session jumped 50% in the last four months of our study period.

Methodology

We analyzed more than 1 billion lines of U.S. clickstream data across mobile and desktop devices from October 2024 to February 2026 to learn how people interact with ChatGPT and how ChatGPT directs traffic across the web.

All figures shown in this article represent U.S. sessions found within Semrush’s 200M user clickstream panel.

Note:Clickstream data is a user’s trail of digital activity as they navigate through websites, apps, or other platforms. That data includes detailed information about interactions, such as the sequence of pages visited and time spent on each page. 

With this clickstream data, we were able to see: 

• The language of each specific ChatGPT prompt in the sample
• Where people navigated to after interacting with ChatGPT
• Whether or not ChatGPT’s search feature was enabled during users’ interactions 
• Patterns among ChatGPT prompts and referral visits

ChatGPT’s total traffic has plateaued

After explosive growth through most of 2025, ChatGPT’s total traffic has leveled off.

ChatGPT’s traffic plateaued around November 2025, hovering near 1 billion monthly visits through early 2026. 

Referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 206% in 2025

Outbound referral traffic (the visits ChatGPT sends to other websites) kept growing despite the plateau.

Comparing January 2025 to January 2026, we saw 206% year over year growth.

The takeaway: ChatGPT is still growing as a traffic referrer. 

Marketers should stop seeing ChatGPT as a destination. It is increasingly becoming a doorway to the open internet, much like Google is/was. AI platforms like ChatGPT are the gateway into how people discover brands; shaping which results they click on, the journeys they take, and which answers they trust. Agentic search optimization (ASO) as a pathway to success, not a destination, should become your next priority.

Belinda Conde Bautista, SVP Marketing, Datos (a Semrush Company)

More domains are getting referral traffic from ChatGPT

The distribution of ChatGPT’s referral traffic also broadened considerably over the study period. 

In October 2024, ChatGPT referred traffic to roughly 71,000 unique domains in the sample per month. 

That number peaked at around 260,000 in October 2025 (around the time of the ChatGPT traffic plateau) before ending at approximately 170,000 by February 2026. 

The October spike could be from seasonal activity related to the holiday shopping period or an intentional adjustment from OpenAI regarding how ChatGPT cites domains. We can’t say for certain. 

Most referrals go to websites in online services, mass media, and publishing 

The websites receiving the most referral traffic from ChatGPT fall into a few industries you’d expect: online services, computer software and development, and mass media. These cover the broad range of topics ChatGPT’s tech-savvy, general-purpose user base tends to ask about.

But education stands out here. ChatGPT’s user base skews younger and student-heavy, so a high volume of referrals to education domains makes sense — but what’s driving those clicks is less clear. 

It could mean ChatGPT is pointing students to good sources. It could mean students aren’t getting what they need and are clicking out to find it elsewhere. It could also be as simple as students researching colleges and navigating to a university site to learn more.

Are students clicking out because ChatGPT is genuinely pointing them to good resources? Or because it can’t fully answer something and they need to go elsewhere? Those are very different stories: learning companion you can rely on vs leaky bucket with some mighty hype cycles. 

Myriam Jessier, GEO & SEO Consultant at Pragm

Over 20% of ChatGPT’s referral traffic goes to Google

Even as ChatGPT continues to grow and refer people across the web, Google is the primary beneficiary.
 

The share of ChatGPT’s total referral traffic that goes to Google climbed from roughly 14% at the start of the study to over 21% by early 2026.

For marketers, it means you’d better have your SEO foundation ready if you’re trying to get more AI visibility. 

It could be that users go to Google to confirm their findings and navigate to brands they just discovered via ChatGPT. 

Further reading:ChatGPT is not replacing google — it’s expanding search [study]

This is also supported by our recent survey of 1,000+ U.S. consumers asking about how they use AI tools. Most respondents reported that they use AI and traditional search together — not one or the other.

For marketers, this confirms something important: ChatGPT visibility and traditional search visibility aren’t for separate people. Your audience is likely using both in tandem to research and make decisions. 

30% of all ChatGPT referral traffic goes to just 10 domains

Google alone accounts for 21.6% of all ChatGPT referral traffic. The next nine domains combined add another 8.6% — bringing the share of all referrals going to this top 10 to just over 30% as of February 2026.

Most of these are expected — large platforms with massive existing audiences. 

Deepseek.com at #7 signals that ChatGPT users bounce between multiple AI platforms. 

This concentration has stayed pretty stable over time. The top 10 domains have held between 20% and 32% of all referrals since October 2024.

ChatGPT enables search on roughly one-third of queries 

As of February 2026, ChatGPT enabled web search on 34.5% of queries, which is down from 46% in late 2024.

There are a few reasons why ChatGPT uses search. 

1. The user selects “Web Search” when prompting ChatGPT
2. The user specifically asks for sources
3. The model is uncertain
4. The question involves recent facts or information after the training cutoff date

Keep in mind that ChatGPT’s training data has a cutoff. As of January 2026, that cutoff is June 2024. This means that anything that happened after that date lives outside what ChatGPT knows from training data alone.

So, queries about recent events, like “who won the NBA Finals in 2025,” require web search to answer. When you ask ChatGPT about recent events, search gets triggered. When you ask ChatGPT something that could be answered the same way two years ago, ChatGPT relies on what it already knows.

The share of search-enabled sessions has been volatile throughout the study period — ranging from as low as 15% to as high as 66.3%.

One possible reason: OpenAI released numerous models and made updates to those models (according to model release notes) between October 2024 and February 2026. Those may change how aggressively ChatGPT reaches for live web data.

Interestingly, both the number and share of search-enabled sessions declined every month from November 2025 through February 2026. 

Shorter queries trigger search, while longer queries rely on training data

Throughout the study, queries that triggered search were consistently shorter than those that didn’t.

But in recent months, this gap has narrowed significantly.

Comparing January–February 2025 to January–February 2026:

• The average prompt length for search-enabled queries nearly doubled: from 4.7 words to 8.7 words
• The average prompt length for non-search queries nearly halved: from 24.9 words to 13.5 words

We shouldn’t ignore the evolving nature of prompts. It shows just how fast people are evolving into new behaviors in real time, simply because AI search makes them possible. We’re not watching search get cannibalized; we’re watching it expand. AI search is layering on top of traditional search, not replacing it, which means marketers need to treat them as related but distinct channels. Both will matter enormously in the years to come, and your budget and focus should reflect that.

Eli Goodman, SVP of Product Solutions, Semrush

Most ChatGPT prompts don’t match traditional search language

To understand how much ChatGPT prompting resembles traditional search engine queries we cross-referenced the prompts in this dataset with Semrush’s database of over 27 billion keywords.

For most of the study period, between 65% and 85% of prompts couldn’t be matched to any traditional search keyword in Semrush’s database.

A traditional Google search could be “best project management software,” while the ChatGPT equivalent could be “I manage a 12-person remote engineering team and we’re constantly missing sprint deadlines. What should I change about our weekly standups?” 

Such complex and specific queries don’t exist in a traditional keyword database. If we could classify that prompt’s intent, it would probably land in informational — or in a new category like creating, analyzing, or ideating.

That said, the share of prompts using traditional search language nearly doubled from October 2025 to February 2026, going from 18.9% to 34.9%.

And among the prompts that do match a traditional search term, most of them have navigational or transactional intent.

This makes sense. When people already know what they want — a login page, a product, a sign-up flow, etc. — their prompts sound more like traditional search. Terms with navigational intent (e.g., “notion login”) and transactional intent (e.g., “buy running shoes nike”) are direct by nature.

But with queries that have commercial and informational intent, people are looking for knowledge and exploring options. When you take that mindset to a more flexible tool like ChatGPT, it makes sense to prompt it in a new way that doesn’t resemble traditional Googling. 

This doesn’t mean informational and commercial research isn’t happening on ChatGPT. It just means that ChatGPT interactions with those intent types don’t use traditional search language.

People are learning the model doesn’t need the scaffolding they thought it did. The tech is shaping how we search by its very nature, just like Google did. As a librarian, I got to see in real-time how people went from knowing what an index page and a table of content was in a book to “how do I even search in a book.” Google did that. And now LLMs are doing it to Google.

Myriam Jessier, GEO & SEO Consultant at Pragm

People are asking ChatGPT more queries per session

The average number of queries per ChatGPT session sat between 1.16 and 1.21 for most of 2025 — then jumped 50% in the final four months of our study period to reach 1.75 by February 2026.

As ChatGPT’s traffic plateaus, the people who keep coming back are more committed users. 

Less casual users, more power users.

Maybe the way ChatGPT seems to want users to engage more playfully, more as a thinking partner, is catching on. 

The most common prompts in the dataset

“Describe me based on all our chats — make it catchy!” was prompted more than 21,000 times by more than 21,000 unique users in our clickstream sample. 

That’s 5x more than “hola” and 7x more than “hello,” which are the next-most common queries. 

The rest of the top prompts are a mix of navigational queries, testing prompts, and pre-suggested prompts from ChatGPT’s interface.

The pre-suggested prompt category is an interesting one.

The popularity of the “describe me” prompt wasn’t a coincidence. ChatGPT suggested it to users alongside a memory update, encouraging users to test its new limits. 

People ran with it and shared their responses all over social media. 

Same story with the barbecue invite. It was a pre-loaded suggestion on ChatGPT-4o mini’s start page, and it became one of the most-repeated prompts in the dataset. 

Effectively, people ask ChatGPT what they’re told to ask ChatGPT. Which is worth keeping in mind for any brand thinking about how to use ChatGPT’s creative side to engage their own audience. 

Considering ChatGPT in your digital strategy

ChatGPT referral traffic grew 206% in 2025. But the top destination was overwhelmingly Google.

The brands winning in AI visibility are the same ones seeing strong SEO results, too.

Semrush One tracks both in one place.