ChatGPT now drives 25% of sign-ups at Japan freelance marketplace

A Japan-based freelance marketplace running since 2004 has seen its share of new sign-ups from ChatGPT surge from 3.7% in April to nearly 25% in September 2025, with one week hitting 33%. The site owner discovered that standard referrer-based tracking was unreliable for ChatGPT traffic, as visits were misattributed to X or marked unknown due to missing referrers. Accurate counts were only achieved by parsing the utm_source parameter in landing URLs, which ChatGPT automatically appends to outbound links. The owner also made a series of technical improvements — including a sitemap, robots.txt entries for AI crawlers, structured JSON-LD data, and an llms.txt file — though none were described as unconventional tactics. Notably, the traffic pattern shifted over time, with ChatGPT increasingly directing users to specific job listings rather than blog articles, suggesting the platform's structured JobPosting data plays a key role in how the AI surfaces its content.
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