Now that AI-based answers are becoming common in the results page in lieu of satisfying user questions, there is widespread worry that one of the most dependable sources of traffic will be disappearing—especially among the smaller publishers on the web.
Until recently, Google Search has been the silent driver of the economy of the open web. A writer at a publication wrote an article, did her/his best to ensure it was keyword-ready, and left the fate of that traffic to billions of people searching on the site every day.
That’s no longer the case. Data revealed to Axios shows that Google Search referral traffic to publishers fell by 34% from December 2024 through to December 2025 compared to December 2023 to December 2024. This drop in traffic is not even and cannot be made up for through the emergence of AI chatbots.
The information, which was collected by the analytical agency called Chartbeat for thousands of their customer sites worldwide, gives us one of the most comprehensive depictions yet of how referral traffic has changed under the impact of advanced technologies used for searches. Chartbeat has studied internet traffic trends in its network of publishers for almost twenty years.
In addition to a 34 percent fall of Google Search pageviews, Google Discover – personalized news feed used on mobile phones with an Android OS as well as within the Google app – experienced a reduction of 15 percent during a year period. The two sources together formed the biggest referral channel for most digital publications before, and this is why such a reduction in both is especially tragic.
Though the total stats are scary, it looks even worse when looking into publishers by the size of their operations. Chartbeat divides its publisher base according to the average number of pageviews per day into three categories, and the disparity is huge.
In particular, small publishers — understood as those getting anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 pageviews a day — suffered 60% reduction of search referral traffic during the last two years, almost triple of what the bigger ones had to deal with. The medium ones, getting 10,000 to 100,000 pageviews a day, saw their search referral traffic fall by 47%. And finally, large publishers, receiving over 100,000 pageviews a day, felt only 22% loss of this type of traffic.
According to experts, the reason for such disparity in the impact can be found in the relationship the publisher develops with its audience. The bigger ones usually are known better, enjoy direct audiences and have their own apps and newsletters, and therefore, search is not that prominent traffic generator for them. But for the smaller ones, often relying fully on search engines to get their traffic, the situation looks very serious indeed.
Another quite surprising discovery related to the current situation concerns the use of the AI chatbots like ChatGPT in terms of redirecting visitors to webpages. Even though people have been expecting that the generative AI would be able to provide the referral traffic to the web publishers, the real numbers tell a different story.
While the amount of referrals directed from ChatGPT to web pages increased by more than twice during one year, the overall contribution of chatbots in all referrals was only 1%. It may mean that the problem occurs because the AI chatbot works as the overview tool on the Google platform. Thus, when a user receives an answer on his/her question in the search result, he/she does not visit the webpage of the publisher anymore.
Within their own research, Ahrefs has checked about 300,000 keywords. It appeared that due to an AI overview on the top of the search result, the CTR rate has declined greatly, especially from over 7% to under 2% during December 2023 and December 2025 for informational first-position queries in search results.
Though the number of visits via search queries has plummeted, overall traffic to websites for the publishers tracked in Chartbeat’s network has by no means fallen to nearly the same extent. The average weekly pageviews among all charted publishers have actually declined by merely 6% in moving from 2024 to 2025 – a relatively small reduction that is partially explained by other variables than search traffic.
This implies the re-direction of traffic, rather than disappearance of visits. News media and publishing sites in general have experienced increased percentages of direct and organic traffic among all referral sources, in addition to increased engagement through email newsletters and mobile applications. This implies that those publishers that had managed to build relations with their audiences, independent of search, seem more resilient to this change.
