Claude sent nearly four times more referral traffic to websites in April than in January, according to new SE ranking data.
This made it the fastest growing source of AI traffic among the five platforms tracked. This is still by far the smallest line, and it’s probably not yet a significant line in your analytics.
For the sake of transparency, SE Ranking sells AI visibility tracking tools. The figures come from its own Google Analytics dataset.
What the data shows
Claude’s traffic share in the SE Ranking dataset increased from 0.0029% in January to 0.0141% in April, a 386% increase.
Most of this increase occurred in March, when Claude’s stock rose from 0.0049% to 0.0127%. SE Ranking says this is the largest single-month increase in Claude’s history in its dataset.
AI platforms combined accounted for 0.33% of traffic in April, up from 0.1976% a year earlier. As part of this, ChatGPT generated 78.23% of AI-referred traffic over the entire 16-month period. Perplexity follows at 9.33%, Gemini at 6.85% and Copilot at 3.57%. Claude represents 1.40%.
Between January and April, ChatGPT’s referral traffic increased by 1.53% while Gemini’s referral traffic increased by 63%. The same data set showed Gemini Passing Perplexity earlier this year.
How the SE ranking explains the March jump
The SE ranking connects the increase in March to the public attention on Anthropic in February. Anthropic has publicly stated that it will not allow Claude to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons. The statement came during a dispute with the Pentagon on Claude’s usage restrictions.
The report points to external figures that point in the same direction. He cites Similarweb data showing that Claude reached 11.3 million daily active users on mobile in early March. Ramp AI Indexbased on enterprise spending data, reported Anthropic adoption by 34.4% of enterprises in its data, compared to 32.3% for OpenAI.
The report does not mention OpenClaw
One thing missing from SE Ranking’s analysis is OpenClaw, the open source agent framework that runs on Claude models.
OpenClaw was one of the biggest Claude-related stories from the same window. It launched in November and had reached 247,000 GitHub stars by early March. Observers called it the fastest growing project in GitHub history. Anthropic restricted access to subscriptions for third-party harnesses, starting with OpenClaw on April 4.
This is additional context rather than an explanation of the reference numbers. Agent activity does not appear as clicks from claude.ai to websites, so OpenClaw usage would not be recorded in this dataset. This is another type of Claude activity that baseline reports cannot see.
The United States is about ten months ahead
The growth pattern appears similar across all regions in the dataset, but the United States leads in both scale and timing.
As of April, Claude accounted for 0.0186% of US website traffic in the dataset. The EU figure was 0.0100% and the UK figure was 0.0054%.
US websites reached a Claude traffic share of 0.0022% in April 2025. Other regions did not reach a similar level until early 2026, approximately ten months later.
Why it matters
The percentage increase makes the growth appear larger than the traffic behind it. A nearly 4x increase still leaves Claude with a small fraction of the referral traffic. The numbers serve as an early signal to watch for, not a reaction to react to yet.
SE Ranking notes that its data only captures direct clicks from AI platforms and that Claude is primarily used for writing, coding and analysis, not research.
Looking to the future
Future monthly updates will show whether Claude’s jump in March was a new benchmark or a peak. If this continues, sites with US audiences will likely feel the change first. Positions have already changed this year, with Gemini Passing Perplexity in the same dataset.
Featured Image: Flower storage studio/Shutterstock
