Open Source X rival social network BlueSky has made changes to allow publishers to better track referral traffic that comes from posts on the platform. According to a comment from Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the company currently sends referral traffic through Bluesky’s “Go” subdomain, allowing publishers to easily track when visitors to the site come to the site via links shared on social networks.
You can see that when you click on a link shared on Bluesky it will easily appear as the “go.bsky.app” URL before landing on the publisher’s own domain. This allows the publisher’s analytics system to determine that the visitor is from Bluesky.
Liu likes the app in a Bluesky post! They said that the changes came as they saw engagement from, but struggled to determine how it was translated into “actual website traffic.”
Publishers, especially if they aim to be a source of real-time news, like X, are the key demographics that Bluesky is attracting to.
Many news outlets have already reported an increase in Bluesky referral traffic, and some have found that some news outweigh referrals from Meta threads and other platforms like Elon Musk’s X.
For example, Boston Globe reported in November 2024 that it saw three times more traffic from Bluesky compared to threads, and 4.5 times more conversions to paid subscriptions. Also in November, Guardian Australia editor Dave Earley shared that Bluesky Traffic to the Guardian website was already twice as much thread, and Bluesky Traffic to that post was higher than X’s referral traffic in 2024.
The New York Times and other small publishers have also seen high user engagement with Bluesky.
Bluesky COO Rose Wang explained that referrals from Bluesky are happening because “unlike other platforms, they don’t rule out links.”
Her messages were unearthed in both threads and X, the latter changing the way the links were shown in the app, encouraging more people to post directly to X, rather than offsite. (Musk, X owner, confirmed that X’s algorithm is designed to optimize the time spent on X, so the link “feels too little attention.”)
Market Intelligence Provider Sircerweb said that Bluesky generated 38.6 million outbound visits in November 2024, spreading across a variety of news websites, while the thread generated 24.5 million referrals. However, the company noted that 42% of thread traffic drives users to Instagram, a sister app.
TechCrunch asked Bluesky when he made the changes exactly to shift the link through the “Go” subdomain, as it’s not clear based on Liu’s post. The company did not respond immediately to requests for comment, but later confirmed that the app version 1.99 and the feature deployed in the following bug fixes were deployed.
After publication, the BlueSky account also posted that newsrooms can now easily track traffic to the site.
“Starting this week, newsrooms and others can even easier track the amount of traffic Brusky is sending to the site,” the Post said. It reads “For those who set up the analysis, the Bluesky referrer is go.bsky.app.”
The company has been working on referral issues for a while. Last November, we decided not to move forward with another solution to referral issues, including opt-out of options. Liu said earlier this month that the latest Bluesky update, which was rolled out on March 10, 2025, fixed the reference issue. She also responded to Wednesday’s post, adding that the referral feature received another bug fix to address another issue on Monday night.
Updated after publication to include confirmations about Bluesky posts and new features.