Social network Bluesky, an open source X rival, has made a change that will allow publishers to better track the referral traffic originating from posts on its platform. According to a comment from Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the company is now sending referral traffic through Bluesky’s “go” subdomain to make it easier for publishers to track when visitors to their site came by way of a link shared on the social network.
When you click on a link shared on Bluesky, you’ll notice that it briefly displays as a “go.bsky.app” URL before landing you on the publisher’s own domain. This allows publishers’ analytics systems to determine that the visitor came from Bluesky.
Liu notes in a post on Bluesky that the change came about because newsrooms were seeing engagement from likes and reposts in the app but had a harder time determining how that was translating into “actual website traffic.”
Publishers are an important demographic for Bluesky to attract, especially if it aims to become a source of real-time news, similar to X.
A number of news outlets already have been reporting increases in Bluesky referral traffic, with some even finding that Bluesky surpassed referrals from other platforms, like Meta’s Threads and Elon Musk’s X.
For instance, The Boston Globe reported in November 2024 that it was seeing 3x more traffic from Bluesky, compared with Threads, and 4.5x higher conversions to paid subscriptions. Also in November, Guardian Australia editor Dave Early shared that Bluesky traffic to The Guardian’s website was already 2x that of Threads, and Bluesky traffic to its posts was higher than X’s referral traffic in 2024.
The New York Times as well as other smaller publishers have also seen higher user engagement with Bluesky.
Bluesky COO Rose Wang explained at the time that referrals from Bluesky were up because “unlike other platforms, we don’t de-promote your links.”
Her message was a dig at both Threads and X, the latter of which changed the way that links appeared in its app to encourage more people to post to X directly, instead of off-site. (X owner Musk confirmed that X’s algorithm was designed to optimize the time spent on X, which is why links didn’t get “as much attention.”)
Market intelligence provider Similarweb noted that Bluesky generated 38.6 million outgoing visits in November 2024, spread across a variety of news websites, while Threads generated 24.5 million referrals. However, the firm pointed out that 42% of Threads’ traffic was directing users to its sister app, Instagram, not publishers’ websites.
TechCrunch asked Bluesky when exactly it made the change to shift links through its “go” subdomain, as it’s not clear based on Liu’s post. The company has not responded to our request for comment at this time.
However, the company last November decided to not move forward with another solution to the referral problem that included an optional opt-out and Liu said earlier this month that the referer issue had been fixed with the latest Bluesky update rolled out on March 10, 2025. Liu also replied to a post on Wednesday to add that the referral feature just got another bug fix on Monday night to address other issues.
