Google traffic fell by 40%. How to win customers without relying on a single channel

Publishers lost 40.2% of their Google traffic in a year, and AI answers are keeping more and more users inside the search engine. We show what this means for companies looking for customers online.

For years, Google was the most reliable source of customers for many companies. It was enough to rank well, and traffic would come on its own. The latest data shows that this model is weakening faster than expected. We checked what the numbers say, what they do not say, and what marketing decisions are worth drawing from them.

The drop in search engine traffic is accelerating

Chartbeat, a company providing analytics tools to publishers, said in its 2026 Publisher Playbook report that Google Search traffic in its network fell by 40.2% year over year (July 2025 - July 2026). A year earlier, the decline was 21.9%, so the pace clearly increased. Google Discover, the personalized feed of content suggestions in the Google app, saw a decline from 6.6% in the first year to 34.3% in the second.

In share terms, the search engine accounted for about 9% of all page views in the network in July 2024, and only 5% in July 2026. That is a relative decline of nearly 46% over two years.

These figures require caveats. The Chartbeat network consists mainly of news and media sites. The report does not explain whether the yearly declines refer to the number of page views or the channel share, and it does not say how many sites were included in the sample. Chartbeat also sells analytics tools, and the report ends with an invitation to a product presentation. For a company outside the media industry, this is a signal of direction, not a forecast of its own results.

The answer is increasingly staying in Google

The main reason for the changes is AI Overviews, summaries generated by artificial intelligence and displayed above the regular results. According to a field study described by Search Engine Journal, the presence of such a summary reduces clicks on organic results by about 38%. The data cited there indicates that AI Overviews appear in 21% of searches, much more often for question-based queries.

A separate metric is the share of searches that do not end in a click at all (so-called zero-click). Based on Similarweb data, SparkToro estimates it at 68.01% in 2026 versus 60.45% in 2024. Other studies give different values; for example, Bain & Company points to 60% in a survey. These figures should not be compared with the Chartbeat result: one describes the behavior of all search engine users, the other the traffic reaching a specific group of publishers.

Chartbeat notes that general content that is easy to summarize is the most exposed, while original materials are harder to replace with an AI answer. Traffic from chatbots alone does not fill the gap. It increased eightfold in two years, but according to the report it accounts for 0.01% of traffic and in 2026 is declining across all major tools, with ChatGPT as the most effective source. In March, according to Axios citing Chartbeat data, chatbots accounted for less than 1% of referral page views. The report does not explain how these two figures relate to each other.

Ranking position has stopped being a reliable measure

John Mueller, a Google Search spokesperson, admitted in a Reddit thread cited by Search Engine Journal that tracking traditional rankings for AI features is hard to do in a way that makes the result useful. He also confirmed that Search Console, Google's free tool for monitoring a site's visibility, treats the entire AI summary as one block. All links in it get the same position, usually the first.

In practice, a link displayed next to the first sentence of the answer and a link hidden under the “Show more” button look identical in the report, even though the chance of a click is completely different. There is also the method of counting impressions. Links visible by default are counted as soon as the page loads, even if no one scrolls to them. Links hidden behind a button are not counted at all until someone expands them.

Average position was already misleading before. If a page is first with an AI summary and nineteenth without it, and both situations happen equally often, the report will show position 10, which nobody has ever seen.

The new Search Console report on performance in generative features, available to all sites since 31 August 2026, does not solve the problem. It shows only impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode (the AI conversation mode in search), without clicks and without CTR, the click-through rate. Clicks from AI features are included in the overall search data, but not marked separately, so AI CTR cannot be calculated independently.

The traffic did not disappear, it moved to owned channels

The most interesting part of the Chartbeat report is the less alarming one. Despite the drop from search, the network recorded an average of 31.1 billion page views per month in the first seven months of 2026, compared with about 32 billion in 2025. The gap was largely filled by channels over which publishers have more control. Between July 2024 and July 2026, their share of page views increased as follows:

• dark social, meaning links shared in SMS messages, private messages, and closed groups: from 7.1% to 11.3%,
• direct traffic, meaning visits from a typed-in address or bookmark: from 13.5% to 15.9%,
• internal traffic, meaning movement between pages within the site: from 37.9% to 40.4%

Stability was provided by loyal readers, visiting the site at least eight of the last 16 days. Their page views rose slightly, from 14.98 billion to 15.02 billion per month. However, the number of returning readers fell by 8%, and new readers by 14%. Chartbeat recommends treating SEO (search engine optimization) as one of several channels and shifting resources toward audiences the company can influence directly.

What to do in your company in the next quarter

In our opinion, the data does not justify abandoning SEO, but it does justify ending dependence on it. We suggest five specific steps:

1. Check what share of traffic and sales inquiries Google delivers today, and compare the July-to-July trend with Chartbeat's data. In Polish industry materials, 70% and above is considered the risk zone.
2. Build your own contact base, above all an email list and newsletter, because this is the only channel fully under your control.
3. Match channels to your business model: in B2B, usually LinkedIn and industry newsletters; in local companies, a Google Business Profile.
4. Measure outcomes, not positions: visits, sales inquiries, and conversions, and treat presence in AI answers as a yes-or-no question.
5. Invest in original content with your own data and experience that cannot be summarized in a single paragraph.

We advise caution toward the growing group of GEO tools (Generative Engine Optimization, optimization for generative search engines). Among other things, they measure Share of Model, the percentage of AI answers in a given category in which the brand appears. This is a useful signal, but presence in an answer without a click creates no session, so the return on such an investment cannot be reliably calculated today. A more certain measure remains inquiries and sales visible in the company's CRM.