The Year Google Stopped Sending Traffic

We're wrapping up 2025, and over the next few days, we'll be sharing key insights from our year-end report: AI in Marketing 2025 Annual Report.

The report will be available for all subscribers to download in full for free from the 22nd of December.

2025 was the year search fundamentally changed—and most marketers kept optimizing for a system that no longer exists.

Google processed 9-14 billion daily searches. More than ever. But fewer resulted in website visits. AI Overviews appeared for 13.14% of queries by March, more than doubling from January. When AI Overviews were present, CTRs plummeted to 8% versus 15% for traditional results. First position CTR collapsed from 7.3% to 2.6%—a 34.5% decline.

Translation: The ranking you fought for doesn't deliver the traffic it used to. Position one lost 64% of its click value in a single year.

Zero-click searches surged from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025. Digital Content Next reported that the median year-over-year referral traffic from Google declined 10%. News brands down 7%. Non-news down 14%.

Individual publishers faced existential threats. The Verge's editor stated, "Google traffic has been declining...a lot of that decline has lined up pretty clearly with the rise of AI Overviews." Chegg reported a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic. The travel blog The Planet D shut down after traffic dropped 90%.

Yet Google rolled out AI Overviews to over 200 countries.

Search transformed from a discovery engine to an answer engine. And your SEO strategy assumed the old model.

The search landscape fragmented as alternatives gained legitimacy faster than anyone predicted.

ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly active users by September 2025, commanding 82.7% of AI search traffic. Perplexity processed over 780 million queries monthly with 30 million users.

For the first time since 2015, Google's global share dipped below 90%. An Adobe Express survey revealed 77% of Americans now use ChatGPT as a search engine, with 24% turning to it before Google.

Let that sink in: Nearly a quarter of Americans check ChatGPT before they check Google.

Citation patterns revealed strategic shifts. AI Overviews cited Reddit (21%) and YouTube (18.8%) most frequently, with Reddit citations surging 450% in three months. User-generated content comprised 21.74% of all AI citations.

The algorithm isn't just changing how it ranks. It's changing what it values. And it's valuing conversational, human-generated content over traditional SEO-optimized pages.

Your competitor isn't another company with better backlinks anymore. Your competitor is Reddit threads and YouTube videos that answer questions better than your landing pages.

Looking toward 2026, organizations face a choice they're not ready to make: optimize for language model inclusion or accept algorithmic invisibility.

Y Combinator projected traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026 and 50% by 2028. LLMs cite only 2-7 domains per response—far fewer than Google's 10 blue links. Semrush predicted LLM traffic would overtake traditional search by the end of 2027.

Connect the dots:

If your domain isn't in those 2-7 citations, you're commercially invisible to the fastest-growing search behavior.

Forrester reported 89% of B2B buyers adopted generative AI as a key source of self-guided information. In markets where 71% of Americans used AI search to research purchases, absence from generative responses means you don't exist in the consideration set.

Generative Engine Optimization requires fundamental shifts most marketing teams haven't acknowledged:

Citation authority replacing backlinks - It's not about who links to you. It's about whether language models cite you as authoritative.

Structured data outweighing SERP snippets - Traditional meta descriptions optimized for blue links matter less than structured content optimized for language model comprehension.

Conversational queries surpassing rigid keywords - People don't ask AI "best CRM software 2025." They ask, "What CRM should I use for a 50-person sales team that integrates with HubSpot?"

Your content strategy is optimized for the first model. Discovery shifted to the second. And most marketing departments are still measuring success by SERP rankings that deliver 64% less traffic than they did 12 months ago.

By 2026, discovery shifts from link-based visibility to language model citation. The competitive moat isn't SEO anymore. It's whether AI trusts your content enough to cite it.

The Verge lost traffic. Chegg's business model collapsed. The Planet D shut down entirely. These aren't edge cases. They're leading indicators.

Yet most marketing teams are still running SEO strategies designed for the 2019 Google and still optimizing for keywords, still building backlinks, and still measuring SERP positions.

The system changed. The playbook didn't. And the gap between what worked and what works is widening monthly.

This isn't a prediction. It's a measurement. Traffic is down 10-14%. Zero-click searches are up to 69%. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users. Reddit citations surged 450% in three months.

The question isn't whether search is changing. The question is when your strategy will.

—

We're publishing our complete AI in Marketing 2025 Report on December 22nd. 10 chapters analyzing what actually happened this year—content creation, social media, search, email, customer experience, advertising, analytics, operations, privacy, and team structures. Plus, 2026 predictions that will make you rethink your entire strategy.

Stay tuned. This is going to be comprehensive.

— Torsten & Peter

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