Referrals to my website in 2025 compared to 2023
Compares referring websites between 2023 and 2025 and shows the rise of ChatGPT as a referrer
How do my referrers compare across time?
When I read Inger Mewburn's post Machines are talking about you behind your back on her famous Thesiswhisper blog, I was struck by her comparison of referrers between 2023 and 2025 and decided to do the same comparison for my website.
The results were remarkably similar. They demonstrated the enduring dominance of search engines, the demise of Twitter and the rise of ChatGPT. My top-3 referrers are identical in the two years in question, with the bulk of my traffic still coming from Google searches.
But whereas in 2023 LinkedIn was ranked #4, it has now dropped to #7, though with more time spent on each page. Even more dramatically, Twitter (t.co) dropped from #6 to ranking out of the top-25. This no doubt is largely caused by the fact that, since it was replaced by X, I am no longer using it.
However, there are other social media platforms that I am not using that do result in referrals. Facebook registered more than 11,000 referrals, up from just over 1,000. I must go and find out what they are talking about when referring to my website, but I need to create and account for that :-(. If anyone knows, please drop me an email.
ChatGTP referrals
The biggest surprise though was the number of referrals from ChatGPT. I do not use AI and have been quite critical of it (see my two white papers below), but it clearly does result in significant traffic to my website, mainly to the Publish or Perish page. Moreover, it has one of the lowest "bounce rates", users who leave the website after visiting just one page.
Well, I'd rather have ChatGPT referring to my website than making up an answer, though probably it is doing both. When I searched for the most likely questions resulting in a referral to the PoP page, it was making up metrics that PoP doesn't deliver (and didn't mention several that it does deliver) and also inaccurately claimed that PoP only searches Google Scholar.
When asking ChatGPT about journal rankings it covered the Journal Quality List, but with HUGE inaccuracies, including not picking up that this is a collation of a range of rankings, wrongly indicating that it ranks journals from A+ to C, and giving completely wrong examples of journals ranked at a specific rank.
For instance, it ranked Journal of Organizational Behaviour as C. When I pushed back, it said: Yes, you are right and proceeded to give the correct rank, saying "I hope that clears things up! Thank you for catching that."
- Academic etiquette & service in the age of GenAI
- GenAI - Use it to Generate Inspiration (if you must), not Automation
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Copyright © 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Wed 7 Jan 2026 09:04
Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.
