Google Search referrals to the web have plummeted, AI links are 'less than 1%' of traffic

New data shows just how impactful AI has been to the web, with Google Search referrals falling off of a cliff while traffic from AI source links are next to nothing.

Data gathered by Chartbeat and shared by Axios reveals that, over the past year, Google Search traffic to publishers across the broader web have fallen drastically, and proportionally more so for smaller websites. Referral traffic from Google apparently fell by 60% for “small publishers,” while “medium publishers” (those with between 10,000-100,000 daily pageviews) saw a drop of 47%. “Large publishers,” meanwhile, saw a 22% drop. That last category would be any site getting over 100,000 daily pageviews.

It’s not just Google Search either. While Search traffic dropped by 34%, traffic from Google Discover has also fallen by 15% over the past year, the report found.

AI certainly isn’t making up the difference.

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While many AI products, including Google’s own, have improved how they surface source links to the rest of the web, this report found that “chatbots still account for less than 1% of all publisher page view referrals.” And that’s an improvement. Apparently, ChatGPT referrals grew by over 200% over the course of 2025.

As far as traffic from AI chatbots go, the report found that “news and media websites receive the highest overall number of page views from AI platforms,” but with the “lowest engagement,” seemingly as users only visit the source links to fact-check the notoriously unreliable AI results. The report also brought out that “email, apps and instant messages” are a growing source of referral traffic, and that overall traffic “dropped 6% between 2024 and 2025.”

Another recent report found that tech media in particular has been hit hard in recent years, with Google Search traffic to sites such as The Verge, HowToGeek, and many others having dropped by as much as 85% or more over the past year. Digital Trends was hit particularly hard with a 97% drop – the publication notably laid off almost its entire full-time staff in early 2025.

Google last year said that “total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year,” and that “average click quality has increased and we’re actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago (by quality clicks, we mean those where users don’t quickly click back – typically a signal that a user is interested in the website),” seemingly in opposition to this report’s findings. The company also said that it “care[s] passionately – perhaps more than any other company – about the health of the web ecosystem.”

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