ChatGPT removes UTM tracking from its outbound links

ChatGPT has stopped appending utm_source=chatgpt.com to its outbound links and now opens them with noopener,noreferrer, which also blocks the referrer header, per Search Engine Roundtable. Adobe’s Cedric Huesler, analyzing about 500 pages that got at least 5% of their traffic from ChatGPT, found ChatGPT-attributed visits fell by roughly 31,000 a day from October 9-13 while direct traffic on the same pages rose by about 26,000 a day — visits that analytics tools can no longer tell apart from ordinary direct traffic. The timing lines up with GPT-6’s release about a week earlier; OpenAI has not said whether the change was intentional.