Every quarter we report on what digital-first public companies are saying about organic search and AI traffic. We also track their revenues on a dedicated page.The quotes below are shown as they're given, so the most recent quote is at the bottom of the page.
Key highlights:
- AI search traffic converts well, but remains too small to offset organic losses
- Google's AI Overviews are being reported as having the biggest impact on traffic
- A handful of companies (Shopify, Etsy, Groupon) are reporting organic growth
- Traffic from LLMs remains negligible for most; often below 1% of a sites total
Marketplace to buy and sell new and used cars
Unique visitors have been stable at over 9 million a month and 80% of them come direct to Auto Trader. 13% through organic search and 4% through paid web traffic. AI chatbots represent less than 1%, which isn't changing significantly, despite monthly LLM users reaching almost 4 billion globally.
Known for Turbotax and Quickbooks
GEO is here to stay. Customers are going to start there and ask questions. And so we want to make sure that our content is showing up, that we're referenced, and that they can easily connect into our products.
Modern furniture company
In quarter one, we invested in AI readable content, structured data, and creator ecosystems to drive agentic engine optimization.
The teams have been really working to ensure all of our content is readable. You know, with LLMs, there's often a lot more words that help kind of describe what people are looking for versus traditional Google search. So the team have been doing a lot of work around AI readability and kind of getting all of that structured in place.
Real estate industry insights
With Homes.com, we are very prevalent on ChatGPT. I've heard that we are more prevalent than just about anybody else on there for generative optimization. We think actually the experience of the full going into Homes.com and the full AI integration at the UX level is more powerful than a module in ChatGPT.
However, the story is still, the traffic is not coming from that source. You're still single-digit right now. So it's more of a window dressing than a reality, but we'll keep an eye on it.
Online booking platform for hostels around the world
Years ago, people would talk about the fact that SEO had given way to paid advertising. Now over the last 12 or 18 months, AI Overviews are giving way to paid advertising. So there's lots of changes. And of course, we also have the rise of the AI platforms in terms of citing without delivering traffic.
The volumes of traffic from AI platforms is not material. I would also say that's a very common question that's asked of other OTA platforms, and they would echo the same. It's still very nascent. And I think the rules are still being written about how you get cited and how you get traffic. So it's a bit of a watching brief.
Freelance services marketplace
I think most noticeable is how Gemini is being integrated into the experience of search on Google. And so it exposes more people to LLM experiences, which, by churn, obviously impacts the traffic that we're getting. So traffic used to come only from search. Then it became LLMs as well. And now it's becoming hybrids of LLMs and traditional search, which essentially lowers the volume of traffic, which we called out as one of the major headwinds.
So the organic is actually getting squeezed down, which means that the impact of SEO is going down. And this is why we and probably every other company is making also an investment in GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, to make sure that we are inside those LLMs, and we are. The click-through in LLM in general is obviously smaller than it is on search.
Discuss and share anything
These product efforts, paired with consumer marketing, helped drive daily active users and offset headwinds in users coming from search. Search referrals were choppy in the quarter and traffic was more volatile later in the quarter.
And then with the evolution towards AI Overviews, I think more broadly, what we see is 10 blue links has driven tremendous value and growth to the broader ecosystem. From where we sit, AI Overviews has yet to make a similar level of positive impact. And I think that's consistent across the broader landscape, right. Us, businesses, publishers, retailers. But we're still looking for that win-win. But our visibility on search continues to remain low, and we expect it to probably continue to be volatile.
Property marketplace which lists homes for sale and to rent
Over 85% of our traffic comes direct and organically. And in June, that also was over 90%. Meanwhile, less than 0.5% of our traffic came through LLMs, unchanged from 2025.
Digital and print publisher
Google traffic, search traffic in the quarter was about 21% of our traffic. In the past, we've said it was roughly ⅔. So we're clearly closer to the other side of it, but we're not out the other side of it.
As they've developed the AI products and particularly AI summaries, which are a search replacement, we don't receive any consideration for the use of our content. And in fact, AI summaries compete with us because we no longer — as you can see in the numbers, get the level of traffic from Google, not even close that we used to, because they're using our content in search.
We would like Google to split its search and AI crawlers.
Shopify
$SHOP
Commerce platform to grow businesses
Search remains one of our largest sources of buyer traffic to our merchants, and it's still growing. Traditional search sessions are up 1.3x over the past 2 years, holding roughly ⅓ of all storefront sessions. That is AI as a complement to search rather than a substitute for it.
Both AI-driven traffic and also orders to Shopify stores tripled year-over-year in the second quarter.
Half of all AI-referred sessions are landing directly on a product description page. That is 2.5x more than what we see with traditional search.
Conversion from AI search runs nearly 80% higher than traditional organic search as well.
Antique and modern furniture eCommerce
It's [Tastemaker Ambassador Program] important, again, not just because it's a hedge against the uncertainty around SEO and trends in the search market, but also it's a way to reach a broader audience and specifically a younger audience than we've reached in the past
Book vacations, cars, flights and hotels
For us, organic search traffic is stable to slightly up. Now, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, AEO is one of our fastest-growing channels. And SEO has remained a bit soft, but it's stabilized over the last few quarters. And I think it's due to the great work that our team has done.
A number of quarters ago, we organized a small team to look at organic across the board, AEO and SEO, and they've increased testing velocity, both sort of technical and content. They've been doing — as I said, they've been doing more tests. They've been using AI across the board in order to improve our performance in that channel.
Job search engine
What we found is that the traffic that comes through those 2 channels, while still a small portion of our overall traffic mix is what we describe as high-intent traffic. These are active job seekers who are in the process of actively looking for a job. And as a result, their engagement on our service is on the higher end of what we see from job seekers
Home service professionals reviews
The most visible near-term pressure is on unbranded organic search. However, Google has been putting its own pressure on unbranded organic search for years now. Effectively, they have reduced our reliance on their free search traffic. Our unbranded SEO channel is down close to 5% of our total service request volume, and our plan does not assume recovery there.
LLM engines are taking a growing share of the informational searches that historically brought homeowners to marketplaces like us.
We're actually doing reasonably well with LLM share of voice. Our most recent data says we're at the top of the industry and double the share of our closest competitor, but share of voice on LLMs is not where we believe the action is because it does not deliver conversion the way it does in SEO.
Provider of legal services
During the quarter, Google accelerated their shift to AI-powered search, with AI-generated answers increasingly replacing traditional clicks. This is affecting top-of-funnel traffic across our industry.
The majority of our traditional search traffic, both organic and paid, has historically run through Google. As AI-generated answers replace clicks on informational queries, fewer of those visits reach us and paid inventory has become more expensive.
Traffic from AI platforms grew more than 250% quarter-over-quarter and accounted for approximately 3% of our LLC formations traffic in June. These visitors also arrive with high intent and convert at higher rates than traditional organic search traffic.
Homework help and education resource
Now we're going to focus on academics and job-related questions. So that's an advantage that we have that others don't have. But in terms of content creation, so that will be one of the areas. But our SEO strategy will expand dramatically based on the listings, based on the data that we have around students
Note: This may be about Chegg and/or another site they own, Internships.com
Digital media and radio advertising
Search volumes continue to come down, but our other sources of traffic, including what I just outlined in terms of direct and social, continue to climb. And as an end result, we're seeing audience growth.
Buy and sell new and used cars
SEO declines appear to have bottomed in late 2025, and direct traffic, our largest organic channel, grew year-over-year in the first half of 2026.
Organic traffic has consistently remained around 60% of our total traffic.
Buy and sell designer items
In general, for us, just more broadly, we're thinking about optimizing TRR for agentic search. For example, AEO. I'm confident we are keeping pace and moving with the customer in a lot of ways.
We're also using AI and our proprietary data to automatically add richer detail to every listing, information like occasion, collection and trend data just to require manual input. This means items are more discoverable, both on and off platform.
Handmade and unique items marketplace
We're continuing to see strength in own channels like SEO.
This quarter, our organic GMS that was not driven by marketing grew. So we've got — that's nice to have the fundamental underlying growth from SEO and from the app and from the owned channels.
Traffic from agentic experiences is still less than 1% of our overall traffic. We're still seeing the same things that we shared last time. There's higher intent, higher average order value traffic.
National and local news platform
We saw some of that lumpiness in the second quarter, alongside the continued shift in consumer behavior away from traditional search.
The decline in uniques that you are noting and that we all are seeing during the quarter, it does not reflect lower demand for the content. What it reflects is lower referrals from traditional search because of those consumer discovery changes that we're seeing and witnessing.
At the same time, audiences are increasingly discovering content through AI systems that answer questions directly for consumers. What that means is we are now effectively serving two audiences, human readers and the AI platforms that surface our work to them.
Coverage across the USA TODAY NETWORK generated 97 million page views with search driving nearly 65% of that traffic. That reinforces an important point. When content meets a real and urgent need, search still delivers.
Travel review and booking platform
We estimate the impact of the SEO pressure accounted for approximately five percentage points of growth headwind to this segment.
This [Hotels & Other] segment remains highly profitable, but is well understood to be challenged by structural changes in our primary SEO channel.
Our hotels business, which was really built on the back of SEO, we continue to work through that.
Personal finance insights and analysis
SMB revenue was $22 million, down 11% year-over-year, driven primarily by organic search revenue declines in SMB products, partially offset by revenue growth in business loan originations.
The [AI/LLM] traffic is converting well. I mean, I think intent is extremely high when someone is coming through an LLM in terms of wanting to transact in a marketplace. It continues to be a pretty small part of our business today, but it's definitely an area of investment and growth for us.
A lot of the impact that we've already seen in terms of our educational content being effective the last three years has played out. I think we're starting to see what the future looks like.
User reviews and recommendations
It does seem that we've bucked the trend. I think our area has been different when it comes to AI Overviews. Our categories that we get a lot of traffic in are highly monetizable. And while you do occasionally see AI Overviews, they're usually not right at the top. And so I think there's some element of Google trying to preserve its own revenue there that is a bit protective.
We also saw some positive changes on the algorithmic side for Google, where we've seen they've started to really lean into user-generated content in a big way, I think, because of the onslaught of spam and low-quality content. And so that's benefited us as well.
Medical uniforms and clothing
Strong gains registered across search and traffic are great starts, and we then see the added stickiness through ongoing traction across our social following, email sign-ups and engagement rates.
Deals on restaurants, stores and events
The organic search landscape is being rebuilt around AI-generated answers and our search foundation work is paying off. Revenue from our organic channels returned to growth in Q2, and accelerated to double-digit growth in July. We are using AI to produce and structure quality local content at a scale that was not previously possible, making our platform more relevant to both traditional search engines and AI systems.
Digital media and internet company
We continue to see declines in search referral traffic. We're certainly not alone. I think this is an industry-wide experience. We're seeing an increase in the rate of AI Overviews within the Google search experience on the queries that are relevant to our properties. I think the last time I provided a statistic, I think it was around 36% of our queries presented AI Overviews. That's at 50%.
And so GEO has become kind of the new SEO. So I think we feel good about that. It's early days.
Technology website operator
"We're encouraged to see that the two key performance indicators, citations and cited pages, trending positively in the second quarter."
Home to media brands like The Street and Parade
We've been witnessing an unprecedented structural shift in digital media, which is reflected in our results from Q2. For years, publishers relied heavily on traditional search traffic until LLMs stepped in almost overnight to capture and consume those audiences directly.
Google is still a major traffic provider for all of us. For all publishers still provides over 40% of traffic, and it goes across News, Discover, Search, and that's still a really meaningful part of our business.
I'll say broadly, LLMs put the box in your search results that everybody can type in and get an answer right there and doesn't have to go to another website.
Stock photos and images
On the iStock front, we continue to see search engine referral traffic declines and the knock-on impact to our affiliate traffic sources as the search engines implement AI-generated answers. This is impacting new customer acquisition.
Hire top freelance talent
Google's changes to search have dampened new customer acquisition with accelerated negative impact in Q2. Our SEO rankings have continued to step up, but the channel overall is smaller, underscoring the importance of the ongoing paid acquisition efficiencies we've been driving.
Specifically, Google has changed SEO referrals and the layout of the search page so that many fewer searches on Google result in any kind of referral to any kind of business. And that's really what's weighing on new client acquisition.
Community driven publications
Google search traffic has been stable for us in recent months but is still down significantly from prior year.
We've been encouraged by recent product changes Google has made to attempt to surface more links to authentic firsthand discussions like those found in our communities, but these aren't yet contributing to growth.
