Chartbeat (analytics used by thousands of publishers worldwide) shared data with Axios. Over two years, search traffic dropped for everyone — but unevenly: small publishers (up to 10k views/day) lost 60%, mid-sized (up to 100k) — 47%, large ones — 22%. The big players have apps, newsletters, direct traffic. The small ones built their entire strategy around SEO.
In just one year, December 2024 to December 2025: traffic from Google Search dropped 34%, from Google Discover — 15%. These are the two biggest referral sources in the world.
Chatbots aren't making up for any of it. Referrals from ChatGPT grew 200% in a year — sounds impressive, but it's still under 1% of total pageviews. Nieman Lab ran the numbers for themselves: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity combined gave them 0.7% over the year.
Meanwhile, overall publisher traffic only fell 6%.
People are still reading — they're just not coming from search. Direct visits, newsletters, and apps are growing. Search is no longer the main traffic driver.
And Google, for its part, is testing rewriting headlines in search results. AI takes a publisher's headline and rewrites it to match the user's query. The Verge's headline "I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything" became "'Cheat on everything' AI tool" — a critique turned into a recommendation. The Verge's editor compared it to a bookstore ripping off covers and changing titles. There's no opt-out. In Discover, this already became a permanent feature in January 2026.
First, AI Overviews answer for the user so they don't have to click. Then they rewrite the headline to control how the link looks. Each step puts more distance between the author and the reader.
P.S. I'll repeat my point from the post about the Small Web — you need to build an audience around yourself. And the sooner the better. Getting noticed through the growing wave of info-noise and slop is only going to get harder.