Is Organic Website Traffic Actually Collapsing?

Recent headlines would lead one to believe that an internet-wide collapse in organic website traffic is happening. Roger Lynch, CEO at Condé Nast, stated that search traffic had dropped significantly for 3 years straight and that businesses should plan as if there were no traffic from search engines. Test Coches, a Spanish automotive site, reported a 90% decline in traffic after a Google algorithm update. Overfishing.org, a non-commercial informational site about fish stock depletion, became so traffic-starved by Google’s AI Overviews that it was forced to shut down. Chartbeat’s data from over 2,500 publisher websites showed Google search traffic declined 33% globally and 38% in the United States from November 2024 to November 2025.

That’s why I was more than a little surprised that none of the accounts my agency manages have experienced an SEO traffic loss. They’ve either held steady or improved. It turns out that my agency wasn’t the only one.

GoodFirms surveyed 192 marketers, including myself, and found that two-thirds reported an increase in organic traffic in 2026. The majority of those surveyed also had increased leads and conversions from content and growth in content engagement.

Researching the issue further, I found that the picture is complicated to say the least.

What’s Driving the Traffic Changes

Several major factors have contributed to changes in search traffic, and not all of them are AI.

Changes to Google’s Search Algorithms Wipe Out Some Sites

The past several years of Google algorithm changes have been chaotic, volatile, unpredictable, and poorly timed around Black Friday. The results of those changes have often been perplexing at best and highly destructive to many websites at worst.

Take for example the September 2023 Helpful Content Update (HCU). The HCU used a machine learning classifier that was supposed to lower the ranking of low quality, unhelpful sites written primarily for search engines. Instead, it decimated many niche and indie publishers, with affected sites experiencing traffic losses of 50-95% from which very few recovered.

I, along with many other agencies and consultants, saw noticeable drops in referral traffic across accounts post-HCU because the algorithmic damage to small publishers radiated out to affect other parts of the web. While I will say that many of the referring sites weren’t going to win any awards for design or editorial quality, they weren’t terrible sites, and certainly not useless content written to game search algorithms.

After wrecking a bunch of small internet businesses and doing precious little about content farms and AI slop in search results, Google declared HCU a resounding success and rolled the classifier into their core algorithm updates. The March 2024 core update hammered the same sites impacted by September’s HCU again, dropping rankings and traffic further.

Following that, Google started rolling out core updates approximately quarterly. What those core updates have had in common is frequently nonsensical and highly volatile changes in rankings. Whether that’s due to the helpful content classifier, other algorithms, or the interactions between different parts of Google’s ranking system is anybody’s guess. Thus far, the December 2025 core update caused the most dramatic fluctuations, with 15% of pages that ranked in the top 10 falling out of the top 100 rankings, measured across 20 niches in SE Ranking’s analysis.

Major publishers were not exempt from the December 2025 core update carnage. An analysis by Digiday found that MSNBC suffered a stunning 71% loss of search visibility. The same analysis noted double digit drops for reputable journalistic outlets, including: The New York Times, BBC, Reuters, Politico, AP News, CBS News, and NBC News. But the analysis did find a handful of winners, including Substack that saw a 30% search visibility boost. Yes really, the blogging platform with 12 low quality blogs run by snakeoil salesman for every authoritative one and the persistent “Nazi problem” got a 30% visibility boost from Google. Clearly, what the average user of a search engine needed was more neo-Nazi propaganda.

Changes to Google’s Search Engine Results Pages Reduce Organic Visibility

Adding insult to injury, Google made changes to the SERP (search engine results page) that weren’t positive for organic traffic. In August 2023, Google cut FAQ rich results other than those from authoritative government and health sites and removed HowTo snippets, shrinking sites’ SERP real estate. Google fully deprecated FAQ rich results for all websites in May 2026.

Did some SEOs use the FAQ and HowTo rich results to spam up the SERP with content of questionable quality? Yes. Had Google simply replaced those rich results with blue links, there would be nothing to complain about. Had Google followed through on its stated reason for retiring those rich results, “to provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience”, nobody would complain.

Instead, Google filled the first page of results with a chaotic jumble of inorganic links and widgets. The number of pixels paid results took up near the top of the page doubled in size between March and June 2026 alone. Quoting Condé Nast’s CEO, “I basically have to go to the second page to get an organic result.”

I agree! And are we really living in a better world by having Gemini inaccurately summarize important government and health information instead of having exact quote FAQ dropdowns?

AI Overviews Substitute for Website Visits

In May 2024, Google introduced the world to both having most of the above the fold space on the SERP eaten by a giant AI Overview box and its comically bad AI. Despite the AI telling users to put poo on a balloon, eat rocks or add glue to pizza, and handing out some terrible medical advice, AI Overviews still slashed traffic to websites.

A study by Pew Research tracked 900 people’s behavior while using Google search, and found that searches with AI Overviews nearly halved click through to other websites, with links appearing in the AI summary itself clicked just 1% of the time. A randomized study of 1,065 Chrome users found that the presence of AI Overviews reduced organic visits to websites by 39.8%. In April of 2025, SEO tool company Ahrefs found that AI Overviews reduced clicks to top-ranking pages by 34.5% percent, a deficit that grew to 58% by December 2025.

One would be forgiven for thinking that turning to search ads would be a workable strategy. Google has to make revenue somehow right? Unfortunately, AI Overviews also appear to reduce paid traffic. Seer Interactive found that SERPs with an AI Overview experienced a 68% drop in click through rate for search ads, measured between June 2024 and September 2025.

Yes, you read that right. Google is scuttling it’s own ad revenue by reducing search ad clicks and starving publishers that run ads on their sites to show users AI summaries that cost money to generate and attract defamation lawsuits. So far Google’s AI Overviews have gotten it sued by an electric company, a Utah man named Murray, Jimmy Keene from the Black Bird series, and a German publishing house.

My head canon is that Google is actually run by an LLM. It would explain a lot. In fairness to Google, some of their decisions might have been driven by inevitable and irresistible forces.

AI Chatbots Don’t Replace Search Traffic Losses

That brings us to the next hallucination-prone product diverting traffic from websites, the generative AI chatbot. People love AI chatbots. ChatGPT was the fastest growing consumer app in history circa 2023.

Why do people love these chatbots so much? I mean aside from parasocial relationships with a bunch of bits flying around a data center. According to the Nielsen Norman Group (bolding in the original), “generative AI offers substantial shortcuts around the often tedious and time-consuming work required to research a topic.” Both AI Overviews and chatbots let users skip searching, judging source credibility, reading extensively, and evaluating conflicting perspectives. Chatbots take offloading over the finish line by enabling users to skip synthesizing information, something AI Overviews are less effective at given their limited length and scope.

Oh. It’s the open web and Google’s old business model versus the irresistible, immovable force of consumer laziness. I’ll place my bet on laziness, at least if or until generative AI can’t lift off the runway — lengthy and circular though that financial runway may be.

In the meantime, user’s search habits are changing. A Comscore panel study of over 1 million U.S. users found that people who adopted ChatGPT or similar tools cut their traditional search use by 21.7% — specifically for question-style searches that SEOs would categorize as informational queries. Navigational searches to get to specific websites, like the perenially popular “facebook” query, held steady. Another study examined Comscore data during the rollout of ChatGPT Search and found that outbound clicks to websites from chat conversations totaled a mere 5.2%. Google searches sent outbound clicks 31.1% of the time during the same period. However, note that part of Google’s outbound clicks were for navigational searches, something people don’t use AI chat for, so chats and searches aren’t directly comparable.

The data coming from the website side of the traffic transaction shows the same change. Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO at web infrastructure company Cloudflare, reported that ChatGPT only sent 1 visitor per 1500 page scrapes. As of October 2026, Ahrefs data across 118,000+ tracked sites shows all AI assistants combined account for just 0.46% of traffic.

The Organic Traffic Paradox

That all sounds very dire. For some websites it already has been. But for now at least, the organic traffic collapse is not evenly distributed.

Kevin Indig’s analysis of Similarweb data found that while 62.5% of U.S. sites declined, about 1% of domains accounted for 40.2% of total lost visits, and that total visits to the quartile of smallest websites grew 19.3%. Losses are concentrated in publisher sites, particularly food, health, news, and adult with gaming and entertainment seeing less severe declines.

I suspect that adult sites taking a major traffic hit has more to do with new age-gating laws than AI or algorithm changes. A lot of users don’t want to show their government documents to a website and many adult sites geo-block users in areas with age restrictions. Additionally, people’s behavior may have changed due to factors that brought those laws into being in the first place. I don’t have any hard data to support these speculations, but provide them as food for thought.

The traffic changes for non-publisher sites are considerably more modest, as summarized in the table below.

A Content Square analysis of traffic across over 6,500 websites spanning 9 industries and 71 countries showed a 1.76% drop in organic traffic between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025. Services was the only industry that didn’t experience a drop in organic traffic, with an uptick of 3.27%.

A Semrush analysis of over 50,000 websites across 17 industries found a 2.38% overall growth in organic search traffic in 2025. Most categories lost search traffic, but product-heavy categories experienced search growth, with the biggest winners being apparel at +21.91% and beauty at +19.52%.

The Content Square and Semrush data skew more heavily toward products and services than the Similarweb data.

What This Means for Your Website

The big takeaway is informational queries that used to drive organic traffic are getting absorbed by AI and many large, information-dense websites are losing visibility thanks to algorithm changes. What that means for your website depends on your business model.

If you sell products or services, the organic traffic situation is something to keep a close eye on, but not imminently disastrous. In particular, you may want to reevaluate top-of-funnel (TOFU) website content since that’s the traffic getting eaten by AI Overviews and chatbots. That doesn’t mean stop making TOFU content related to what you sell, it means you shouldn’t make traffic to the website a KPI. Getting mentioned or cited by AI for your TOFU content can build brand awareness and brand authority, so you should change the way you measure performance accordingly.

Publishers on the other hand, are in serious trouble from algorithm changes and AI. AI is particularly dangerous, since most consumers perceive the AI output to be an equivalent substitute and never visit the original, even when there’s a link to it. If content is the product, you’ll need to aggressively control what scrapers and bots can access so you’re only handing out bite-size samples instead of the entire inventory. If you’re a big enough publisher to cut a deal with an AI company for content access, you should consider it. In the near future, even small publishers may have an easy way to get paid for AI access to their content, with services like Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl, which is still in closed beta as of November 2026.