Bluesky Sets Easy Ways For Publishers To Track Referrals

An open source competitor of X, the social network Bluesky, has announced a modification that would let publishers better monitor the referral traffic coming from postings on its network. To make it easier for publishers to trace when visits to their site arrived via a link published on the social network, Bluesky is now routing referral traffic through its “go” subdomain, according to a remark made by Emily Liu, an employee of the firm.

You’ll see that when you click on a link that was posted on Bluesky, it first appears as a “go.bsky.app” URL before taking you to the publisher’s own website. This makes it possible for publishers’ analytics systems to identify Bluesky as the source of the visitor.

The reason for the move, according to Liu’s article on Bluesky, is that newsrooms were observing engagement from likes and reposts on the app but were finding it more difficult to ascertain how it was converting into “actual website traffic.”

In particular, if Bluesky wants to become a real-time news source like X, publishers are a crucial group to target.

Numerous news organizations have already noted a surge in Bluesky referral traffic; some have even discovered that Bluesky referrals have eclipsed those from other platforms, such as Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads.

For example, in November 2024, The Boston Globe reported that Bluesky was bringing in three times as much traffic as Threads and that conversions to paid subscriptions were 4.5 times greater. Dave Early, the editor of Guardian Australia, also reported in November that Bluesky traffic to The Guardian’s website was already twice as high than Threads’, and that Bluesky traffic to its pieces exceeded X’s 2024 referral traffic.

Bluesky has also experienced increased user involvement from smaller media, like the New York Times.

At the time, Bluesky COO Rose Wang clarified that the reason for the increase in referrals was that “unlike other platforms, we don’t de-promote your links.”

She made fun of both Threads and X in her message, with the latter altering the way links showed in its app to encourage more users to post to X directly rather than off-site. (X owner Musk acknowledged that links didn’t receive “as much attention” since X’s algorithm was made to maximize the amount of time spent on X.)

According to market research firm Similarweb, Threads produced 24.5 million referrals and Bluesky produced 38.6 million outgoing visitors in November 2024, distributed among several news websites. The company did note, though, that 42% of Threads’ traffic was going to its subsidiary app, Instagram, rather than the websites of publications.

Since it’s unclear from Liu’s article, TechCrunch questioned Bluesky about the precise moment it decided to switch links through its “go” subdomain. Our request for comment has not yet received a response from the corporation.

Though Liu stated earlier this month that the referrer issue had been resolved with the most recent Bluesky version, which was released on March 10, 2025, the firm last November opted not to proceed with another remedy to the referral problem that included an optional opt-out. In addition, Liu said in a Wednesday reply to a post that the referral feature recently received a bug fix on Monday night to fix other problems.