A leaked file reveals the user interactions that OpenAI is tracking, including how often ChatGPT displays publisher links and how few users actually click on them.
By the numbers. ChatGPT shows links, but hardly anyone clicks on them. For one top-performing page, the OpenAI file reports:
- 610,775 total link impressions
- 4,238 total clicks
- 0.69% overall CTR
- Best individual page CTR: 1.68%
- Most other pages: 0.01%, 0.1%, 0%
ChatGPT metrics. The leaked file breaks down every place ChatGPT displays links and how users interact with them. It tracks:
- Date range (date partition, report month, min/max report dates)
- Publisher and URL details (publisher name, base URL, host, URL rank)
- Impressions and clicks across:
- Response
- Sidebar
- Citations
- Search results
- TL;DR
- Fast navigation
- CTR calculations for each display area
- Total impressions and total clicks across all surfaces
Where the links appear. Interestingly, the most visible placements drive the fewest clicks. The document broke down performance by zone:
- Main response: Huge impressions, tiny CTR
- Sidebar and citations: Fewer impressions, higher CTR (6–10%)
- Search results: Almost no impressions, zero clicks
Why we care. Hoping ChatGPT visibility might replace your lost Google organic search traffic? This data says no. AI-driven traffic is rising, but it’s still a sliver of overall traffic – and it’s unlikely to ever behave like traditional organic search traffic.
About the data. It was shared on LinkedIn by Vincent Terrasi, CTO and co-founder of Draft & Goal, which bills itself as “a multistep workflow to scale your content production.”
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