ChatGPT referrals to B2B sites jump 303% to 2.6m a month, Demandbase reports

August 18, 2026 · ppc.land

Labs by Demandbase measured 2.6 million monthly ChatGPT referral visits to business-to-business websites in June 2026, a 303% rise from roughly 645,000 in June 2025, in a report distributed August 12, 2026. The dataset spans more than 11 billion visits across 1,584 platform tenants between June 2025 and July 31, 2026, with growth concentrated in a sharp jump in May 2026 that more than doubled prior monthly volumes. Demandbase does not explain the May inflection and offers no absolute figures for Perplexity, Gemini or Claude beyond noting Perplexity referrals fell while Gemini and Claude stayed flat. Spread across the 1,584 tenants, the year's gain works out to fewer than 1,700 additional ChatGPT-referred visits per property per month, and even at 2.6 million visits, ChatGPT referrals amount to roughly a third of one percent of the platform's total measured traffic.

Connected television spending on Demandbase's own ad platform grew 112% over the same year, moving CTV's share of measured ad investment from 1.53% to 2.08%, still a fraction of the 43% CTV share projected across the broader US TV ad market in 2026. Buying groups increasingly complete comparison research inside AI assistants before reaching a sales team: LinkedIn research cited in the report found 94% do so, which means brand visibility inside those retrieval systems now functions as a buying-stage variable alongside traditional media plans. Campaigns that treat ChatGPT referral volume as a stable channel risk exposure to abrupt swings, since Profound research found ChatGPT referral traffic dropping 52% in August 2025 after OpenAI reweighted citations toward Reddit and Wikipedia.