ChatGPT’s traffic surge is good news for brands. For publishers, it’s complicated

OpenAI made a change to how ChatGPT links to websites in the spring, and barely anybody noticed. Starting on May 7, ChatGPT began sending considerably more traffic to websites. Referrals jumped 157% overnight and have stayed there, according to new data. On the same day, OpenAI also began rolling out advertising in AI answers, a move that had been in the works for several months. The two are related, and you can tell because of the kinds of sites that ChatGPT is linking to: homepages. Since t...