This publication led Friday’s edition with a Scrunch study putting AI referrers at 1.1 percent of publisher visits. Today’s number looks like a rebuttal. Demandbase, an account-based marketing platform headquartered in San Francisco, says ChatGPT referral traffic to the business-to-business sites it tracks grew 303 percent year over year. The two figures do not disagree. They cover different populations across different time frames, and a growth rate can look enormous while the base underneath it stays thin.
Start with the count itself. Demandbase puts monthly ChatGPT-referred visits to its customers’ sites at roughly 645,000 as of June last year. By this past June, that number had reached 2.6 million. The company disclosed the gain in a Wednesday morning release, published August 12 at nine Eastern, with chief marketing officer Rachel Truair supplying the accompanying comment.
That comparison sits inside a larger measurement effort. Demandbase says its Labs research arm tracked upward of 11 billion site visits, spread across 1,584 customer tenants, over a stretch running from June 1, 2025 through July 31, 2026. The twelve-month figure the company highlights is a slice of that fourteen-month collection window, and Demandbase does not reconcile the two spans in its release.
Scale keeps the headline honest. Divide 11 billion visits by roughly fourteen months and the platform sees something near 786 million visits a month. Set 2.6 million ChatGPT referrals against that base and the share lands close to a third of one percent, an estimate built from Demandbase’s own totals rather than a figure the company states directly. Separate research published in February 2026 pegged ChatGPT’s outbound traffic at roughly one 190th of Google’s, even though the assistant fields something near 12 percent of Google’s search volume, a gap this release does nothing to close.
That order of magnitude is why the two studies from this newsletter can both stand. A 303 percent increase and a roughly 1 percent referrer share answer separate questions. One tracks how fast a single channel is moving inside one vendor’s customer base. The other tracks what portion of total visits AI assistants supply across a wider set of publishers. Neither number describes the open web on its own.
The sharpest data point in the release is also the least explained. Demandbase says referral volume jumped abruptly in May 2026, more than doubling against the prior months, and it does not tie that spike to any OpenAI product change, to turnover among the tenants it counts, or to a change in how it measures traffic. PPC Land, which broke down the Labs figures, flagged that same gap.
Where growth stalled matters as much as where it accelerated. ChatGPT accounts for most of the AI traffic reaching the sites in Demandbase’s dataset. Perplexity referrals fell across the same window. Gemini and Claude held flat. None of the three rivals gets an absolute number attached, so decline and flat describe direction only, not size.
Several gaps limit how far the release travels. Demandbase does not say whether the same 1,584 tenants populated the dataset for the entire fourteen months, a detail that matters because the headline figure is a raw total, not a per-tenant rate. Spread the roughly two-million-visit gain evenly across those tenants and the average comes to well under 1,700 extra ChatGPT visits per property each month, though the company supplies no distribution data to confirm an even split. The figures also have not been independently audited or reproduced by another firm; the methodology is described in the release rather than documented, and the underlying dataset stays proprietary to Demandbase.
For search and content teams, the two studies together argue for the same next step: check what share of your own traffic already comes from AI assistants before assuming the channel is either negligible or booming. A vendor-reported quadrupling inside one customer base is not evidence of a market shift until it shows up in a site’s own referral logs.
PPC Land, in an August 16, 2026 report by Luis Rijo on Demandbase’s Labs data.
