AI Sent Very Little Traffic to Europe’s Crypto Media in the Third Quarter But Showed Up in Referrals

The third quarter of 2025 didn’t bring any dramatic shifts for Europe’s crypto media, but it did make longer-term trends easier to spot. Traffic was there and audiences were still active, but with fewer spikes and less noise, discovery felt slower and more selective than earlier in the year. That quieter pace made smaller signals easier to notice – things that might have been drowned out in a busier quarter.

Q3 was also when MiCA stopped being something everyone talked about and started being something companies actually had to work under. The pace slowed down a bit. There were fewer hype cycles, fewer sudden traffic spikes, and a calmer, more predictable news cycle.

In that kind of setting, small changes in how information surfaces start to matter more. With fewer people actively searching and fewer stories breaking at scale, alternative discovery paths,  including AI-based search and chat tools, become easier to spot. They’re still a small part of the picture, sending around 510,000 readers (0.76% of total visits), based on Outset PR’s latest data.

Inside the referral layer, AI accounted for more than 13% of total traffic but that number isn’t spread evenly. For most outlets it barely shows up at all, while a smaller group sees AI quietly delivering a meaningful share of their incoming readers.

Source: Outset Data Pulse

AI as a discovery layer, not a growth engine

During the quarter, 41% of crypto-native outlets recorded some level of AI-driven traffic, while the remaining 59% saw none at all. In practical terms, AI was visible across a meaningful minority of publishers, but far from universal. Where AI did show up, it mostly came from tools people already use to ask questions or look things up, led by ChatGPT and Perplexity, with Gemini, Copilot, and Claude appearing less frequently.

What stands out isn’t the volume, but how uneven that exposure is. In the most extreme cases, AI tools generated more than 60% of total referral traffic for a handful of outlets. Several mid-tier publishers saw AI account for roughly 40–50% of referrals, while a broader group of analytically focused sites fell into the 25–35% range. These high percentages almost always appeared at outlets with smaller overall traffic bases, inflating AI’s share without meaningfully changing total visit numbers.

AI visibility clustered around publishers producing evergreen analysis, explainers, educational material, and reference-style content, which are all formats that AI systems can easily parse and resurface.

Big media, by contrast, largely remained outside this flow, continuing to rely on direct traffic and branded search. This aligns with earlier findings from Outset PR’s Q2 research, which showed that Eastern European audiences primarily access crypto portals via direct visits, reinforcing how loyalty still outweighs experimental discovery layers across much of the region.

For now, AI behaves less like a traffic channel and more like a filter deciding which sources appear, not how much traffic flows.

The Q3 environment AI is entering

Across Eastern and Western Europe, crypto-native publishers generated 67.5 million visits in Q3 2025, up nearly 4% quarter over quarter. That headline gain hides what actually happened month to month, with traffic slipping steadily from July through September.

The recovery wasn’t evenly shared. Eastern Europe delivered nearly all of the quarter-over-quarter growth as the region rebounded from a sharp Q2 drop and began to level out. Western Europe finished the quarter roughly flat overall, but most of the month-to-month decline landed there, with traffic falling by close to 18% between July and September. That’s the kind of environment where smaller discovery signals start to stand out, simply because there’s less noise.

Where attention concentrated geographically

According to Outset PR’s findings, ttention also remained tightly concentrated geographically. France led Europe with just over 12 million visits, representing almost 18% of all crypto-native traffic, driven by strong search visibility across large finance and technology publishers.

The Netherlands followed with more than 10 million visits (15.8%), supported by a dense group of mid-to-large outlets optimized for organic and aggregator discovery. Germany ranked third with close to 10 million visits (14.2%), anchored by compliance-focused publishers and evergreen coverage.

Source: Outset Data Pulse

Together with Russia and Poland, these markets accounted for more than 70% of Europe’s crypto-native traffic, reconfirming how narrow the attention funnel has become. When most traffic sits in a handful of markets, anything new, including AI referrals, is more likely to show up at the edges than shake up the core.

Scale still determines who absorbs the pressure

Traffic concentration becomes even clearer when viewed by publisher tier. In Q3 2025, Tier-1 and Tier-1.5 outlets (those averaging more than 500,000 monthly visits) accounted for close to 58% of all crypto-native traffic, getting 39 million visits across just 12 publishers.

Tier-2 outlets, those pulling between 100,000 and 499,000 visits a month, made up about a third of all traffic, with roughly 22.6 million visits in total. Tier-3 publishers added just under 10%, or about 6.4 million visits, while the long tail of Tier-4 outlets contributed only around 1.2%, or 783,000 visits.

This distribution matters for AI because the outlets most exposed to AI referrals tend to sit in Tier-2 and Tier-3, where traffic bases are smaller and incremental visibility gains have an outsized impact, while Tier-1 publishers remain largely insulated by scale and entrenched audience loyalty even as overall discovery continues to narrow.

Source: Outset Data Pulse

Why crypto-native visibility remains fragile

Traffic composition explains why crypto-native outlets experience sharper swings than mainstream media. In Q3, organic search delivered just above 31 million visits (around 46%), while direct traffic contributed 28 million visits (42%). Nearly nine out of ten visits came from just these two channels.

Source: Outset Data Pulse

Referrals made up under 6%, social was just under 5%, and paid traffic barely registered. With so few backup channels, any softening in search or reader habits shows up fast. AI referrals sit right inside that gap – still small, but noticeable because there aren’t many other places new traffic can come from.

Mainstream outlets don’t have this problem to the same degree. With referrals alone accounting for more than 12% of their traffic, they have more room to absorb changes without feeling it immediately.

A quiet but meaningful signal

Q3 didn’t turn AI into a traffic driver for Europe’s crypto media. Search still matters far more, and AI won’t fix falling monthly numbers on its own. What it did do was make certain sources easier to spot when everything else slowed down.

With fewer spikes, fewer viral stories, and traffic concentrated in the same places, even small referral streams start to matter. AI is now nudging visibility in subtle ways. That usually comes before the numbers catch up.