Google's sponsored results are much harder to distinguish. Personal and acquaintance anecdata, sure, but it's a clear trend in my opinion.
A good chunk of my non-tech savvy acquaintances don't know the difference between organic and sponsored and I think these people make up a much bigger part of the search ecosystem than we give them credit for.
The split between median and total visits is the part I will take away from this. It is easy to read an aggregate decline and assume every site is falling at the same rate, but your breakdown shows small sites holding up much better in total, while publishers carry a very large share of the loss. The paid search point also deserves more attention: if ads are taking more space and clicks at the same time, blaming AI alone will lead to the wrong budget decision. I found the AI referral share especially useful for keeping perspective, since rapid growth from a very small base still leaves it a minor share of total visits for now.
The 42% publisher drop is the line I'd pair with crawler access. In a 49-site robots.txt check I ran, 11 of the 15 news publishers blocked Claude-SearchBot and 5 blocked OAI-SearchBot, so the sites losing the most organic traffic are often the ones shutting out the AI search bots that could send a little back. Curious whether part 2 splits AI referrals by whether a site lets those bots in.
Google's sponsored results are much harder to distinguish. Personal and acquaintance anecdata, sure, but it's a clear trend in my opinion.
A good chunk of my non-tech savvy acquaintances don't know the difference between organic and sponsored and I think these people make up a much bigger part of the search ecosystem than we give them credit for.
The split between median and total visits is the part I will take away from this. It is easy to read an aggregate decline and assume every site is falling at the same rate, but your breakdown shows small sites holding up much better in total, while publishers carry a very large share of the loss. The paid search point also deserves more attention: if ads are taking more space and clicks at the same time, blaming AI alone will lead to the wrong budget decision. I found the AI referral share especially useful for keeping perspective, since rapid growth from a very small base still leaves it a minor share of total visits for now.
The 42% publisher drop is the line I'd pair with crawler access. In a 49-site robots.txt check I ran, 11 of the 15 news publishers blocked Claude-SearchBot and 5 blocked OAI-SearchBot, so the sites losing the most organic traffic are often the ones shutting out the AI search bots that could send a little back. Curious whether part 2 splits AI referrals by whether a site lets those bots in.