Similarweb tracks chatbot traffic with new GenAI Toolkit

For twenty years, digital marketing had a simple playbook: rank high on Google and cash the checks. But with everyone turning to chatbots for answers, brands have been flying completely blind on whether ChatGPT is praising them, slamming them, or ignoring them entirely.

Website intelligence platform Similarweb just launched its GenAI Intelligence Toolkit, a specialized product designed to track brand visibility and actual referral traffic across major AI chatbots.

Connecting chatbot mentions to actual clicks

AI traffic is no longer a rounding error. According to Similarweb estimates, AI platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Copilot drove more than 1.1 billion referral visits in June 2025 alone. That represents a staggering 357% surge year-over-year.

Marketers are feeling the pressure. Content leads at brands like pet-care network Rover noted that executives constantly demand answers on AI referral numbers and future strategy, yet clear data has been hard to pull together.

Similarweb’s toolkit tackles the problem by pairing two features: AI Brand Visibility and AI Traffic.

The visibility side shows which topics frequently surface your company and what sources AI models cite in their answers. If an engine consistently pulls from a product review site favoring your competitor, you know exactly where to direct your PR efforts.

The real kicker is the traffic feature. Plenty of newer tools can scrape chatbot prompts to see who gets mentioned, but mentions don't pay the bills. Similarweb uses its global panel data to measure which prompts actually trigger referral clicks to specific landing pages, allowing teams to benchmark traffic volume directly against competitors.

SEO teams from brands like Displate pointed out that seeing the actual user prompts driving clicks helps bridge the gap between content strategy and chatbot visibility.

Why it matters

If you manage SEO, brand marketing, or digital ad spend, this toolkit tackles a massive blind spot. We think the smartest thing Similarweb did here was tying visibility to concrete referral traffic. Pure mention tracking is often a vanity metric, especially when conversion and revenue only happen after a user visits your site.

This also sets the benchmark for the shifting SEO industry. As search habits migrate from traditional blue links to conversational engines, agency and in-house teams are under immense pressure to justify generative engine optimization (GEO) budgets to the boardroom.

That said, there is an inherent limitation worth watching. Chatbots are increasingly optimized for zero-click experiences, where the assistant synthesizes the answer directly without users ever leaving the interface. While tracking the 1.1 billion outward clicks is huge, capturing the full offline and brand-recall impact of AI answers remains an unsolved riddle.