Search Is Shrinking, Loyalty Is Growing: What A Deeper Look Into Traffic Reveals 

It’s not just you.

And it’s not just your pageviews.

Chartbeat analyzed years of its platform’s data for the 2026 Publisher Playbook, finding that Google Search’s ability to generate pageviews dropped 21.9% YoY from July 2024 to July 2025, with referrals dropping a further 40.2% YoY from July 2025 to this past July.

Life After SEO: How Newsrooms Are Adapting To The AI Search Shift

Many media managers are concerned about so-called “Google Zero”: the idea that Google will stop functioning primarily as a gateway to the web and will become an answer engine instead. 

AI Content Retrieval ‘Eating Away’ At Publishers

“AI companies’ wholesale piracy of original content has already throttled publisher revenues and, if allowed to continue, could break the back of the free press on which society, including those same AI companies, depends.” This is the warning issued by US trade body Digital Content Next as it revealed that traffic to leading US online publishers fell by 26% in the two years to 2025, which saw the rollout of Google AI summaries.

Meta Pauses Data-Scraping Terms Following Criticism 

Following widespread criticism, Meta has indefinitely delayed proposed terms that would have allowed Instagram and Facebook to scrape the websites of Meta Business account holders for the company’s AI model training purposes. Meta has officially taken down the link to the controversial terms, publishing a statement on its Business Help Center on Nov. 5 explaining that the terms updates in question “are now paused and will not take effect on November 20, 2026.”