Author: admin

Two years in, Threads is starting to look more and more like the most viable challenger to X. It passed 350 million monthly users earlier this year and Mark Zuckerberg has predicted it could be Meta’s next billion-user app.

But Threads still isn’t sending much traffic to other websites, which could make the platform less appealing for creators, publishers and others whose businesses depend on non-Meta owned websites. According to Similarweb, a marketing intelligence firm, outbound referral traffic from Threads climbed to 28.4 million visits in June. That’s a notable jump from 15.1 million visits a year ago, but still relatively tiny considering Threads is currently averaging more than 115 million users a day on its app, according to Similarweb.

Regular Threads users have long suspected that Meta deprioritizes posts with links. For most of the last two years of Threads’ existence the common wisdom was that users shouldn’t share links, or should only share them as replies to a primary post. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, who also oversees Threads, hasn’t exactly encouraged linking either. He said last year that Threads doesn’t intentionally downrank links but that “we don’t place much value on” them because “people don’t like and comment on links much.”

Meta’s reluctance wasn’t just about users’ preferences, though. The company was also concerned about how spammers and other bad actors might abuse links on the text-based platform. More recently though, Meta has changed course, and has been taking steps to surface more “good” links in recommended posts.

“We’ve been working on making sure links are ranked properly,” Mosseri said in June. “Links have been working much better for more than a month now.” The company has also bolstered links on the platform by allowing users to add more links to their Threads profiles and providing link-specific analytics to its “insights” feature. “We want Threads to be a place that helps you grow your reach – even outside of Threads,” Meta said in a May update.

But despite these changes, Threads is still sending very little traffic to websites. Data shared by Similarweb shows that during May and June of last year — when Threads had more than 150 million monthly users — it sent just 24.8 million referrals to outside websites. During May and June of this year, that number more than doubled, rising to 51.8 million.

Those numbers still suggest, though, that the majority of Threads’ users are rarely, if ever, clicking on links they see on Threads. Lia Haberman, a social media marketing consultant and author of the ICYMI newsletter, said she’s not surprised. “People just got trained not to look for them, not to include them, not to think about them,” she tells Engadget. “You can’t just flip a switch and all of a sudden expect people to embrace links.”

Publishers, a group that likely posts more links on Threads than anyone else, don’t seem to be seeing significant traffic from Threads either. Data provided by Chartbeat, a company that provides analytics data to publishers, shows that publisher page views from Threads have nearly doubled since the start of the year, rising from 8.8 million in January to 15.1 million in June.

Interestingly, according to both Similarweb and Chartbeat’s data for 2025, referrals from Threads peaked in March. That month, Threads sent 28.8 million outbound referrals to websites, according to Similarweb, while Chartbeat publishers saw 25 million page views from the platform.

But while the latest stats show that traffic from Threads has grown significantly over the last year, it still represents a tiny proportion of the publishers’ traffic overall. According to Chartbeat, over the last year and a half Threads has consistently accounted for less than one tenth of a percent of sites’ referral traffic. By comparison, Facebook referrals have hovered around 2 – 3 percent over the same period, while Google Discover has accounted for about 13 – 14 percent of referrals. Even among other “small” sources of referrals, like chatGPT, Reddit and Perplexity, Threads is only ahead of Perplexity in terms of the number of referrals it sends.

Threads referrals even pale in comparison to Twitter’s, which was never known as a major traffic driver even before Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. In January of 2018, Twitter accounted for 3 percent of publishers’ page views, according to Chartbeat data reported by the Press Gazette. By April of 2023, after Musk’s takeover but before he rebranded the site to X, that number had fallen to 1.2 percent.

Chartbeat’s data isn’t a complete picture — stats provided to Engadget were based on an analysis of 3,000 sites that have opted in to anonymized data sharing — but the slight increase in referral traffic roughly lines up with another major change Meta made this year. In January, following Mark Zuckerberg’s move to end fact checking and walk back content moderation rules, Threads also ended its moratorium on recommending political content to all users.

Following this change, some publishers of political news, including Newsweek, Politico and Forbes saw a spike in referrals from Threads, Digiday reported. But those gains don’t seem to be universal, and it’s not clear why some publishers may be benefitting more than others. “Threads is trailing significantly in traffic, subscription conversions, and overall conversion rate,” compared with Bluesky and X, the Boston Globe’s VP of Platforms Mark Karolian recently shared on Threads.

While Threads’ growth so far hasn’t been hampered by its inability to drive users off-platform, it could become an increasingly important issue for Meta if it really wants to bring more creators onto the platform. The company is also getting ready to flip the switch on ads on the platform. A user base that ignores links could complicate Meta’s pitch to advertisers, who are already taking a cautious approach to Threads. Meta declined to comment.

Haberman says that Threads’ ambivalence toward links might be symptomatic of a larger identity crisis the platform is still facing. It has a large user base, but it’s not always clear who Threads is really for. It isn’t known as a destination to follow breaking news, like Twitter once was, or as a place with highly-engaged subcultures, she notes. “Threads needs to have a purpose,” she says. “And right now, it seems very much like a suggestion box at work where people are just filing complaints and trauma dumping.”

Whether smaller platforms like Threads can reliably drive traffic to websites is an increasingly urgent question. At a time when online search feels like it’s getting worse, AI is rapidly replacing many searches and cannibalizing websites’ search traffic. Publishers, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, are being hit especially hard by these shifts.

Threads is extremely unlikely to fill those gaps on its own, even if referral traffic vastly improves. And publishers in particular have plenty of reasons not to become too reliant on a Meta-owned platform. At the same time, there’s clearly an opportunity for Threads to play a bigger role in a post-search world. That would not only benefit the creators, publishers and small business owners Meta has long courted, it could help Threads establish an identity of its own.

Have a tip for Karissa? You can reach her by email, on X, Bluesky, Threads, or send a message to @karissabe.51 to chat confidentially on Signal.

Canva users can now create, edit, and manage their designs by describing their requirements to Anthropic’s Claude AI. The connection is the latest of several integrations that allow Claude users to access third-party tools and services, including Figma, Notion, Stripe, and Prisma, without having to leave their conversation with the AI chatbot.

Starting today, Claude users will be able to use natural language prompts to complete design tasks in their linked Canva account, such as creating presentations, resizing images, and automatically filling premade templates. The integration also enables users to search for keywords within Canva Docs, Presentations, and brand templates, and summarize them through the Claude AI interface. The feature requires both a paid Canva account (which starts at $15 per month) and a paid Claude account ($17 per month).

Anthropic is utilizing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that Canva launched last month, which provides Claude with secure access to user Canva content. MCP, often referred to as the “USB-C port of AI” apps, is an open-source standard that enables developers to quickly connect their AI models with other apps and services. Companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, Figma, and Canva have embraced MCP to prepare their platforms for a future tech landscape that’s expected to be filled with AI agents.

“Instead of uploading or manually transferring ideas, users can now generate, summarize, review, and publish Canva designs, all within a Claude chat,” Canva Ecosystem head Anwar Haneef said in a statement to The Verge. “MCP makes this possible with a simple toggle in settings, marking a powerful shift toward user-friendly, AI-first workflows that combine creativity and productivity in one.”

Claude is the first AI assistant to support Canva design workflows through MCP, but the chatbot has other design platform offerings thanks to a similar partnership with Figma that was announced last month. A new Claude integrations directory is also launching on web and desktop today, which should give users an easy overview of all the tools and connected apps at their disposal.

Claude just gained a little more autonomy.

Anthropic, the AI start-up behind Claude, announced Monday that the system can now directly interact with and pull information from a directory of third-party apps and websites, including Stripe, Figma, Prisma, Canva, Asana, and others. The idea is to save users time that would ordinarily be spent transferring information from Claude’s outputs into one of those external services, and vice versa. 

Also: Claude might be my new favorite AI tool for Android – here’s why

“Now Claude can have access to the same tools, data, and context that you do — transforming it from a helpful assistant into an informed AI collaborator that gives you more relevant responses and can work with you directly in your tools,” Anthropic wrote in a press release published Monday.

How does it work?

The new directory is populated by “connectors,” or links to various websites and desktop extensions. Think of them as digital gateways through which Claude can access your data and weave it into new assets.

For example, you can now prompt the chatbot to pull your company’s revenue data from Stripe and organize it into an easily digestible quarterly report, rather than having to transfer the data yourself into an AI-generated template. Or if you’re a project manager and need to update your team’s Asana workflow following a team meeting, you can prompt Claude to reference and pull all relevant information from an Apple Notes doc. Similarly, product developers can ask Claude to pull notes from Linear to track a bug-fixing process, and graphic designers can easily prompt Claude to create designs in Canva.

“Claude is quickly becoming an essential creative partner for millions of people, and this integration brings Canva’s full design capabilities directly into that experience,” Anwar Haneef, head of ecosystem at Canva, said in a statement. “Instead of uploading or manually transferring ideas, users can now generate, summarize, review, and publish Canva designs, all within a Claude chat.”

How to access

The new directory for Claude is available now for all web and desktop users. You can visit the directory here and give Claude permission to access your third-party work data by clicking “Connect.”

More capable chatbots

The announcement arrives at a time when tech developers are busily working to broaden the capabilities of chatbots, driven by an industry-wide belief that the future will be filled with AI agents — systems that can go beyond merely providing text responses to user queries by autonomously pulling external information from across the web.

An agentic travel-planning tool, for instance, might be able to book flights, hotels, and restaurants on your behalf, while also interacting with you directly and in natural language to answer all of your travel-related questions.

Also: How agentic AI is transforming the very foundations of business strategy

The push into agents is co-occurring with — and directly fueled by — what’s effectively become a kind of digital real estate competition among AI companies. Chatbots are no longer siloed by website or app; they’re being deployed across an increasingly vast online landscape, connected with a growing number of external apps, as tech giants vie to make their proprietary AI models essentially the default operating systems for the next evolutionary stage of the internet.

ChatGPT’s image-generation feature, to cite just one recent example, can now be accessed on Meta-owned WhatsApp. OpenAI, which owns the chatbot, also reportedly has plans to weave it into a new suite of productivity tools that would rival the likes of Google Workplace and Microsoft Office 365.

Anthropic’s own computer use tool, which debuted in October, allows Claude to interact with the digital tools on a desktop in much the same way that a human user would. 

Get the morning’s top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.