Organic traffic is down, but it’s not all AI

Tanking SEO traffic can feel hopeless. I have no doubt AI reduces SEO traffic, but some data I just analyzed makes me believe the story is much more nuanced.

Exclusive data from Similarweb containing the traffic channel mix of 10,000 domains in both the U.S. and France over the last three years shows us a 30,000-foot view of how the traffic channel mix changes over time. Other studies have looked at similar angles, but I haven’t seen one that compares countries and spans three years.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series.

Data and methodology

Dataset

• The data is based on Similarweb’s monthly traffic estimates for 10,000 domains in each of the U.S. and France, covering September 2023 through August 2026. The countries contain different website lists, and coverage varies by month, so these samples do not represent the entire national web.
• The dataset contains 663,861 country-domain-month records and 17,863 unique domains across ten channels: organic search, paid search, Direct, referrals, organic social, paid social, email, display, AI, and affiliates.

Methodology

• I compared traffic volumes and channel shares while holding website lists constant within each comparison, then checked sensitivity to site selection, missing estimates, and the largest domains.
• Most channel comparisons use January-August 2026 versus the same months in 2025; the two-year organic-search headline compares August 2024 with August 2026 across 8,658 U.S. sites and 7,730 French sites with complete organic estimates throughout the dataset.
• Industry breakdowns use provisional analyst classifications.
• The findings describe modeled visits, not unique people, spending, or revenue, and do not establish whether AI or paid search caused organic-search losses.

Organic is down, but less than I expected

Visits from organic search are down -13.2% in the U.S. (19.9 billion to 17.3 billion) and -24.4% in France (4 billion to 3 billion) over the last 24 months (August 2024 to August 2026).

Another way to look at this is to ask how the share of organic from total traffic has changed during that time. The answer: U.S. organic traffic dropped from 20.5% to 18.3% since September 2023 (-10.8%). In France, it dropped from 27.3% down to 23.1% (-15.2%).

Not a great prospect for SEO, but the decline is admittedly slower in aggregate than what I see in Search Console or GA4 on the site level. The reason is that the aggregate view here in this Memo simply combines websites with very different outcomes. Only when we segment the aggregate can we see the patterns.

3 forms of concentration

Any aggregate metric across a vast sample set usually holds concentration. You know, Pareto ‘n stuff. Losses are widespread across sites, but concentrated in traffic volume. 62.5% of U.S. sites and 66.6% of French sites declined; about 1% of domains account for 40.2% / 48.5% of gross lost visits.

The first form of concentration I want to show you is large vs. small sites. Smaller sites have lost substantially less organic traffic than large ones. The gains are still small in the U.S. (+2.7%) and small sites shrank in France (-1.9%), but there is a big gap compared to large sites. I didn’t use a particular threshold here but simply cut the set of domains into quartiles.

When we use the sum total of visits instead of median, we see an even starker picture: small sites gained organic traffic in the U.S. (+19.3%) and France (+42.2%), while large ones lost (-13.5% and -27.4% respectively).

The typical small site was roughly flat: up 2.7% in the U.S. and down 1.9% in France. Their combined traffic grew much faster because a minority of sites made unusually large gains. Remove the 100 biggest small-site gainers in each country, and that combined growth turns negative.

Another form of concentration happens around business models. Here, we see publishers getting hit the hardest because their product, content, directly competes with AI answers. In this sample, publishers lost 41.5% of organic traffic in the U.S. and 42.5% in France over the last 2 years. Certainly devastating losses.

When we strip publishers out, we see an even flatter decline: U.S. down 7.8%, France 22.5%. That’s almost half of the U.S. decline.

The third form of concentration is around topics. Health, food, news, and adult-focused sites decline faster than the average in the U.S. and mostly in France as well, with the exception of news. Entertainment and gaming declines a lot slower in the U.S.

Organic search shrinks unevenly across domain sizes, business models and industries. The median site in the smallest quartile is roughly flat, while publisher traffic has fallen about 42% in both markets. Strong gains at a minority of small sites lift their combined traffic totals. The country average provides context, but comparable websites offer a more useful benchmark for an individual business.

Country-level differences disappear when accounting for mix shift

I compare the U.S. against France because I wanted a control mechanism for AI Overviews and regulation. Google just launched AI Overviews in France in July 2026 and European legislators have forced Google to avoid some SERP Features that impact clicks.

Why is France losing organic traffic faster, especially given Google only rolled AI Overviews out there in July of this year? It’s mostly a matter of site selection. When we compare only the same sites in both countries, the gap narrows substantially.

Across the same 1,725 sites, average organic visits per day fell 5.1% in France and 3.6% in the U.S. between June and August 2026. France weakened more around the launch, but this comparison cannot isolate how much of that change came from AI Overviews.

The same happened when AI Overviews launched in the U.S.: while organic traffic in France was up 2.4%, it was down -0.6% in the U.S. (keep in mind Google rolled AI Overviews out slowly in the U.S.).

It’s not all AI

How can it be that Google still makes so much money from ads ($63.3 billion,+16.8% YoY, in Q2 2026) while AI answers a lot of questions? 2 reasons!

One, because Google shows ads before it shows AI Overviews. Two, search ads take up a lot more space and are harder to distinguish from organic results (my opinion – wonder if you agree?).

• On Oct. 13, 2025, Google started grouping up to four text ads under a sticky “Sponsored results” header with a “Hide sponsored results” button. It rolled out worldwide on desktop and mobile, and Google said at the time that ad size would stay the same. 
• Tom Capper from Stat found that since June, the average organic result sits below the common desktop viewport, “aka under the fold,” and ad blocks have doubled in size in a sample of 46,000 head terms. 
• Google reports paid clicks up 13% and average CPC up 3% in its Q2 2026 earnings.

In other words, ads eat into organic clicks as well, and I think we massively underestimate the impact and misattribute it to AI Overviews. The Similarweb data shows clearly that paid search traffic grows while organic tanks:

The chart above indexes the baseline in August 2024 at 100 and shows the change over time. In the U.S., paid search traffic has gained 21% and organic lost 13.2%. In France, paid gained 17.3% and organic lost 24.4%.

But, paid search growth doesn’t completely offset organic losses. If I were to take just the absolute traffic numbers from the chart below, paid makes up about 36.6% of organic losses in the U.S. and 6.7% in France. The reality is probably a lot more nuanced and differs by industry, business model, and time comparison.

I also find it important to call out that Google’s algorithm updates are quite aggressive. For example, the unnamed January 2026 update wiped out tons of ranks for some sites, and I think this is somewhat visible in the aggregate organic traffic chart from the beginning. Some algorithm updates lead to a different site type mix, meaning Google might prefer to show more personal blogs rather than large aggregator sites, as I’ve recently seen it for many travel queries.

AI traffic is still a drop in the bucket

Spoiler alert: AI referral traffic has the strongest growth rate of all channels and reaches 2.85% of SEO traffic in the U.S. and 2.44% in France. In other words, AI referrals account for roughly one in 200 visits.

And yet, it’s a drop in the bucket, even if AI traffic converts much higher than organic. AI traffic reaches only 0.5% of total visits. Even if it doubles or triples over the next 12 months, the impact is negligible.

We’re also seeing forms of concentration in AI traffic. Some industries get a lot more than the average. For example, in both countries:

• Technology, civic services, and careers outperform.
• Entertainment, food, sports, and adult underperform.
• Real estate does better in France, while health does better in the U.S.

I have low hopes that AI referral traffic could ever offset loss of organic traffic. Last week, I wrote about how hard it is to detect hidden AI traffic. But, to be clear, my opinion is that AI traffic is a red herring. I’d focus on whether your brand appears when buyers research your category, then connect that visibility to business outcomes. And just as we’ve seen with traffic, the benchmark needs to fit your industry and market.

Don’t pour the baby out!

The way I make sense of all this data is this:

• Some decline of organic traffic comes from people using AI Chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini to solve tasks they previously used Search for. For example, our AI Mode study shows an average zero-click share of 64%. So, some organic traffic loss could be simply people searching less (this analysis didn’t look into causality behind this claim).
• AI Overviews reduce clicks but not as dramatically as AI Chatbots. Users still click on blue links to some degree even when Google shows AI Overviews in our AI Overviews study.
• Higher ad load on Google and more aggressive algorithm updates cause severe damage to SEO clicks that are often underreported because it’s easier to explain drops with AI.

In some cases, like publishers, the SEO traffic loss is clear, global, and painful. In other industries and even countries, it’s a lot more nuanced. Here is the big problem: A lot of people pour the baby out with the bathwater by adopting the simplistic mindset of “AI is killing all of our traffic and SEO is dead”. That might be true in some cases, but often people miss the impact from advertising and algorithm updates. In other words, most companies can remedy some SEO click loss. Whether the unit economics still make sense is a different question.

The CEO of a large company recently used an analogy I like: SEO is like a melting ice cube. How fast it melts is not completely out of our hands.

This post first appeared on the author’s website and is republished here with permission.