The end of Google traffic is coming faster than expected

Generative AI is breaking the dynamic that built the digital-publishing business.

Since the mid-aughts, the link economy has defined how traffic moves across the internet. Publishers created search-optimized content, and Google (GOOGL), in its turn, sent traffic to their sites. This search traffic sharply increased readership, augmenting dedicated daily visitors with a steady pipeline of more random seekers that publishers aimed to turn into regular readers.

But now, with Google’s rollout of AI Overviews and its even more recent introduction of AI Mode — which competes with ChatGPT by providing synthesized answers to complex questions, heading off the need for links – publishers are cut out of the loop. That’s despite the fact that Google continues to feed on their content, mining articles and digests for its agent-style answers.

Existential-threat levels of declining traffic

All of this means publishers are seeing a tremendous drop in eyeballs, clicks, and readers. Traffic to sites like HuffPost (BZFD), the Washington Post, and Business Insider has dropped by more than 50% in three years, per Similarweb.

Layoffs have followed. Business Insider just cut 21% of staff, making headlines. Meanwhile, over the last years, 1 out of every 10 editors and journalists have lost their jobs according to Bureau of Labor statistics data — a timeline that directly overlaps with the traffic drop.

In response, publishers are racing to build more direct relationships with readers through newsletters and events, a set of plays and pivots that have arguably already been in the works longer than generative AI has been available to everyday internet users.

“We have to develop new strategies,” Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, told the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic is operating on the assumption that search traffic will go to zero.

But could a threat to publishers become a threat to Google?

Whether or not every internet publication can become a conference business or be sustained by its newsletter portfolio is an open question. One thing is sure: a cost structure that obtains content without incurring the cost of content has a tough-to-beat advantage.

As newsletter writer Byrne Hobart recently put it, search “remains the best business in history” — a high-margin cash machine that employs user behavior to improve itself, monetize intent, and reinforce its dominance over both creators and consumers. Everyone from SEO consultants to local restaurants has learned to speak its language. So it’s no wonder Google stock is up some 7,000% since its 2004 IPO, a trajectory that has seen its valuation climb from about $20 billion to well over $2 trillion.

But will Google’s advantage disappear if content producers themselves die off? It might.

Eventually, even the best search engine needs something to search. AI-generated answers still require fresh, high-quality inputs, much of which continue to be created by publishers, the same ones now being squeezed so hard. If Google traffic keeps falling, publishers may have stronger incentive to lock down their content, erect paywalls, or block scrapers entirely. Some already are. That makes the current moment look less like a shift in traffic patterns and more like a complete reorientation of the internet’s most basic business workings. As search evolves into something more agent-like, it risks cannibalizing the very ecosystem that made it powerful.