Users On Threads Hardly Click on Links – Research

Research indicates that the platform, Thread, merely doesn’t generate a lot of referral traffic.

After two years, Threads is beginning to appear to be X’s most promising rival. Earlier this year, it surpassed 350 million monthly users, and according to Mark Zuckerberg, it might become Meta’s next billion-user app.

However, Threads continues to drive little traffic to other websites, which may deter publishers, authors, and others whose operations rely on websites that aren’t controlled by Meta. The marketing intelligence company Similarweb reports that in June, Threads’ outbound referral traffic increased to 28.4 million visits. Considering that Threads presently has over 115 million daily users on its app, that is a significant increase from 15.1 million visits a year ago, but it is still quite small. This information comes from Similarweb.

Meta has long been suspected by regular Threads users to deprioritize postings with links. It was widely believed for the majority of the last two years of Threads’ existence that users should either refrain from sharing links or limit their sharing to responses to core posts. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and the person in charge of Threads, hasn’t exactly promoted linking either. Last year, he stated that although Threads doesn’t purposefully devalue links, “we don’t place much value on” them because “people don’t like and comment on links much.”

However, Meta’s concern went beyond user preferences. The business was also worried about the potential misuse of links on the text-based platform by spammers and other malicious actors. However, Meta has recently shifted its focus and has been working to include more “good” connections in posts that are suggested.

In June, Mosseri stated, “We’ve been working on making sure links are ranked properly.” “Links have been working much better for more than a month now.” By enabling users to add more links to their Threads profiles and offering link-specific metrics through its “insights” function, the firm has further strengthened linkages on the site. “We want Threads to be a place that helps you grow your reach – even outside of Threads,” Meta stated in an update released in May.

However, Threads continues to send very little traffic to websites in spite of these modifications. According to data provided by Similarweb, Threads sent only 24.8 million referrals to external websites in May and June of last year, when it had over 150 million monthly users. That figure more than doubled to 51.8 million between May and June of this year.

However, such figures still imply that most Threads users are hardly ever, if ever, clicking on links they see on the site. ICYMI email author and social media marketing consultant Lia Haberman said she isn’t shocked. “People just got trained not to look for them, not to include them, not to think about them,” she told Engadget. “You can’t just flip a switch and all of a sudden expect people to embrace links.”

The group that probably posts the most links on Threads, publishers, also don’t appear to be receiving a lot of traffic from Threads. Publisher page views from Threads have almost quadrupled since the year began, from 8.8 million in January to 15.1 million in June, according to statistics from Chartbeat, a startup that gives publishers analytics data.

It’s interesting to see that referrals from Threads peaked in March, according to data from Chartbeat and Similarweb for 2025. According to Similarweb, Threads generated 28.8 million outbound website referrals during that month, and Chartbeat publishers reported 25 million page views.

Even though Threads’ traffic has increased dramatically over the past year, according to the most recent statistics, it still only makes up a very small fraction of the publishers’ total traffic. Over the past year and a half, Threads has constantly contributed less than 0.1 percent of the referral traffic to websites, according to Chartbeat. In contrast, Google Discover has accounted for roughly 13–14 percent of referrals throughout the same time period, while Facebook referrals have remained between 2 and 3 percent. Threads only outperforms Perplexity in terms of the quantity of referrals it sends, even when compared to other “small” referral sources like chatGPT, Reddit, and Perplexity.

Even Threads’ referrals are insignificant compared to Twitter’s, which, before Elon Musk’s acquisition of the business, was not recognised as a significant source of traffic. According to Chartbeat data referenced by the Press Gazette, 3 percent of publishers’ page views occurred on Twitter in January 2018. After Musk took charge, but before he changed the site’s name to X, that percentage dropped to 1.2 percent by April 2023.

Although the statistics given to Engadget were based on an investigation of 3,000 websites that have chosen to share their data anonymously, Chartbeat’s data doesn’t give a whole picture, but the little rise in referral traffic roughly corresponds with another significant shift Meta made this year. Following Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to remove fact-checking and revert to its content management rules, Threads lifted its ban on promoting political content to all users in January.

Digiday reported some political news publishers, such as Newsweek, Politico, and Forbes, experienced an increase in referrals from Threads after this modification. However, those benefits don’t appear to be shared by all publishers, and it’s unclear why some would be gaining more than others. The Boston Globe’s VP of Platforms, Mark Karolian, recently posted on Threads, saying, “Threads is trailing significantly in traffic, subscription conversions, and overall conversion rate,” in comparison to Bluesky and X.

The inability of Threads to push users off-platform hasn’t prevented its growth thus far, but if Meta is serious about attracting more creators to the platform, this might become a bigger problem. Additionally, the business is preparing to turn on platform advertisements. A user base that disregards links would make it more difficult for Meta to attract advertisers, who are already wary of Threads. Meta chose not to respond.

Haberman suggests that the platform’s ongoing identity problem may be the cause of Threads’ reluctance toward linkages. Although there are many users, it’s not always obvious who Threads is intended for. She points out that it isn’t recognized as a location with very active subcultures or as a place to follow breaking news, like Twitter used to be. “Threads need to have a purpose,” she asserts. “And right now, it seems very much like a suggestion box at work where people are just filing complaints and trauma dumping.”

The question of whether smaller networks like Threads can consistently increase website traffic is becoming more pressing. AI is quickly taking the place of many queries and eating up website traffic at a time when online search seems to be getting worse. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, these changes are particularly hurting publishers.

Even if referral traffic significantly increases, it is highly improbable that Threads will be able to cover those gaps on its own. There are many reasons why publishers in particular should avoid becoming overly dependent on a platform owned by Meta. In a post-search future, however, there is undoubtedly room for Threads to play a larger role. That might help Threads forge its own identity in addition to helping the authors, publishers, and small business owners Meta has long pursued.