"This year we did a lot of work to drive a lot of interest and traffic for those that use a professional to do their taxes. But we were still operating like a software company versus as a service. If you want somebody else to do your taxes for them, what they want to do is interact immediately with an expert. And to give you an illustrative example, if somebody went on Claude or ChatGPT or Google and said "Tax pro near me" we would show up, but then the first thing we would make them do is to authenticate. Well, if somebody that wants a service, the first thing to do is not to authenticate and create an account. They want to engage with an expert. So that's an illustrative example of where we had a lot of falloff this year. And when a consumer or a business engaged with our expert, our conversion was 80%."

"Because ultimately, those [AI platforms] might become more leads-generating platforms, replacing traditional search. [..] We are partnering with OpenAI very closely, with Microsoft. Of course we're having discussions with all others including Google that, now with AI mode, is really pushing much harder in that area. We think that over time that will be a positive because now we are in traditional search very dependent on one player, but there will be many players out there."

"We saw Google dip below 90% market share recently for the first time in a very long time and, candidly, that's not the best measure for two reasons. One is that's really only measuring traditional search. And the second is that the fragmentation that's happening here isn't a zero-sum game. So we think the fragmentation drives more search, not less search."

"The silver lining is that we've seen stabilization in our B2C Air business now despite facing competitive headwinds and the stabilization in Q4 has been achieved [due] to optimization of our discounts, SEO improvements and increased personal travel attach rates to our corporate channel."

"We are having better success with our social marketing and SEO efforts, which is getting us to the top of more relevant search pages than ever before. As I've said all along, it's a matter of taking a disciplined approach to the fundamentals and executing every day."

"With the 2025 March core algorithm hitting, we saw monthly patterns showing January down 1.8%, February, with one less day than last year, down 4.7%, and March down 16%. I caution that last year, Q2 was unusually strong, as Google algorithms at the time were driving record traffic levels to our forum communities. In the past year and a half, we've been major beneficiaries as Google drove more traffic to user-generated foreign communities like ours and Reddit as it sought to send traffic to authentic voices rather than AI-generated content. Today, Google seems to be more focused on driving traffic to its own AI Overviews and YouTube."

"Princess Polly is also seeing an uptick in organic search from customers that have previously purchased on Nordstrom.com, confirming the thesis that putting our products on multiple channels helps expand awareness and drive customer acquisition."

"I made the statement that I think Google Search is dead, and you may agree or disagree with me, but I don't use Search anymore for many months. It feels outdated. I mean, you put keywords and you get blue links. That's weird. It feels like the 90s. And to me, the same applies for any modern search, meaning that even search within marketplaces need to change, right?"

"Google and their expansion of AI Overviews continues to keep web traffic captive in the Google search experience and migrate search to Gemini."

"Let’s start with organic traffic, where trends continue to move in the right direction. We returned to organic traffic growth in the first quarter, helped by improvements in SEO and direct traffic. These results reflect the impact of our work on site performance, removing low-value pages, boosting crawl efficiency, accelerating page load times and refining SEO landing page content."

"A record 29 million average monthly unique visitors utilize Cars.com to browse, research and submit leads in Q1. Overall traffic of 170 million visits was also up 1% year over year after adjusting for an extra leap day in 2024. Traffic to our news and editorial content was up more than 50% year over year, driven by resources like our American Made Index."

"A growing trend we're seeing and hearing from our customers is the ongoing shift from traditional search engines to social platforms for discovery."

"As the majority of search is now zero-click with AI, traditional content strategies face headwinds as their traffic is changing in real-time. Social media's authenticity, immediacy and community-driven nature fill the gap, offering businesses strong ROI outcomes."

"We see very interesting trends, where in some areas AI is really picking up very quickly and we see some drop in traffic. But on the other hand, we see dramatic improvement in convergence, meaning that customers who are using AI and who see these AI snippets presenting the deal features price. If they come to Groupon, it's much [more] likely that they will finalize the transaction."

"We're partnering with AI search companies to ensure our brands show up well across customer queries and building new experiences to connect with travelers outside our ecosystem."

"In terms of driving traffic to our brands, we all see that people's search behavior is changing. People may be going to ChatGPT or to other of these native AI players. So, we need to make sure that our brands are showing up well there."

"Organic search took a bit of a haircut over the past year. The two drivers: One you mentioned, which is AI Overviews. The other factor is rank. With AI overviews we saw really increasing instances of those in search results over the past year, and we've hit a point where we've stabilized a bit from there. As we think ahead to channels beyond Google Search for example, I'd say top of mind for us is the factors that have historically driven success in areas like Google Search seem to be carrying over to other AI-driven search engines. [..] NerdWallet receives a really high share of referral traffic from AI sources, so I think big picture the way I think about it is AI at its best helps you find a great answer quickly without a bunch of effort or spam. In areas with simple answers, AI is going to meet that user need really well. But where it's more complex, what's important is to offer the best user experience."

"We've seen some effect from search traffic going down to some publishers. Nothing too material, and we've said that before. Now as it relates to the future, one, I think we might see more effect. So as I think about it, let's say publishers have about 30% of traffic-ish coming from search. Could it go 5%, 10%, 20% more down? Maybe, we don't know. But even if it did, I don't think that's a material change because to our overall base"

"We looked at partnerships as an opportunity to really choose the AI leaders in the ecosystem that we wanted to learn from. So, with Perplexity, it puts us in a position to really understand what's happening with AI first search. And we've got great content to attract high-intent traffic with an opportunity to drive hotel and experiences bookings. The learning is how we optimize in an LLM based SEO environment, to really reimagine our user experience. And to think about how we're going to drive value through a combination across licensing, incremental traffic, putting our products in front of these high-intent travelers and then ultimately, direct booking revenue."

"We're investing into a lot of marketing improvements. We restructured the website last year, and we continue to improve the site score. We get higher SEO rankings, so search terms that are relevant to us, get higher and higher rankings, and we're going to continue to do that."

"Meanwhile, PocketGamer.com, the consumer-focused web companion to our events business, doubled its traffic over the course of 2024 and continues to grow as the go-to destination for mobile game news, guides, tier lists and reviews. We are extremely bullish on both the B2B and consumer growth potential of the PocketGamer brand."

"As we reinvest in growth through game title expansion on platforms like Icy Veins and U.GG, new content and SEO investments, and strategic referral partnerships, we believe we are positioned to significantly grow our audience."

"It seems like every month there's algo changes. [..] There's been what I would call some small rebalancing, you know, Google likely reacting to some negative publicity around Reddit and forums being so prominent in the search results. I think they tried to give a little bit of traffic back to those really niche expert publisher sites. And what we've seen is just a very consistent trend that Google is very much favoring user-generated content and understanding its value in the consumer discovery process. And particularly now is people want to go deeper on topics they love. And they want those nuanced answers that frankly, AI just can't give with any credibility."

"Our products like Startpage, MapQuest and CouponFollow show higher engagement benefiting from improvements in SEO, user experience and product expansion."

"First, let's go ahead and start with CouponFollow, our leading couponing and promo code service. CouponFollow had a very strong holiday shopping season and a great fourth quarter, with the site continuing to perform well following Google search algorithm updates in 2024. Our focus on a high quality user experience, and delivering verified real time promotional codes continues to payoff. Organic sessions rose more than 20% sequentially from Q3, and sessions were up 129% year-over-year."

"And on the SEO and organic traffic, call it, 15% to 20% of our traffic is organic. SEO is a piece of that. The rest would obviously be people hearing us and typing us in, etcetera. But, and in terms of the Google algorithm change, what I've noticed Google doing and I quite frankly agree with it, is they are giving more credit to high-quality, unique content that really aids the consumer. So they did things like shutting down the "marketplaces" iof newspaper sites because they basically were leveraging their credibility on the news to go sell jackhammers and screws or whatever and mortgages. We feel really good about it [..] I would say LendingTree has always been unabashedly in the paid marketing camp and I've wanted our SEO side to work since 1999. I would say for the first time, it's really gripping."

"We're very happy with where we're at on SEO. Our SEO revenue in the fourth quarter was actually up 30% year-over-year."

"We weren't showing up in the six million searches on Google for "tax preparer near me". Now we are showing up in about 80% of that market."

"I think the larger issue for us is that when Google and other search engines evaluate real estate websites, they look at general authority in the category instead of separately evaluating whether you're good for sale search or rental search. We think that it has been a significant issue in 2024 that other real estate websites had more rental listings. We could see that very clearly when Realtor.com signed a Zillow partnership. Just looking at that hockey stick in 2024 made us feel like we've got to do something about our inventory. It makes us fairly bullish about what will happen in 2025. Matching another competitor, you may not get the same gain, but we do feel like we've been competing with one hand tied behind our back. We're excited about the traffic benefit."

"We're seeing an increase in conversions in those stores, better SEO rankings, somewhat better local rankings. Not as good as the SEO, but also improving."

"The theory of having two brands was that we could get hopefully double the digital real estate. We could get two entries in the paid search section, two entries in the local or map section, and two entries in the organic or SEO section. [..] And we had some improvement in the maps, but not as much as we anticipated. And we had significant improvement in the SEO where we went from LSI maybe had an average spot of 7% or 8% and we moved them up to closer to 4% or 5%. But 70% of the clicks are in the first three entries. You've got to be on the first page of the organic section."

"So one of the other factors we are seeing on Redbubble is the continued declines in the SEO, and Redbubble has more penetration in the SEO space versus TeePublic. The mitigation for that is fairly paid marketing and profitable paid marketing that we are leaning in, which TeePublic has successfully been able to navigate."

"While there's been industry discussion about AI's potential impact on search traffic, I want to emphasize a few key points. First, our business model is diversified well beyond traditional traffic monetization. With traffic dependent ad revenues representing roughly 35% of our overall revenues. Second, within our traffic, search represents roughly 40% of our visits. Third, with respect to our search referrals, AI's presence remains limited. AI overviews results are present in just 12% of our top queries. Lastly, our analysis of year over year click through rates, specifically comparing queries with similar positions that now include AI overviews shows no material aggregate impact on performance."

"In our analysis of queries where AI overviews are present but we're not present in the past (and our search rank remains unchanged), the overall click through rate is also relatively unchanged."

"In Q4, our partnership revenue continued to grow. However, it was tempered by Google's updated and fluid search policies and algorithm changes which negatively impacted many media companies, Gannett included. Working within the revised policies, we leveraged the vast collection of content produced within our network to continue to drive leads and audience to our partners. Search will always be an evolving space and Google's sudden change reinforces the importance of maintaining flexibility in an evolving market."

"Longer-term, I do think that it’s important to look at broader industry trends, right? So, first AI search engines or chatbots, are they taking share from traditional search engines? I mean, from what we can tell, not really. More people are using search engines than they did last year, but you also see triple-digit growth in AI usage, which says to me that people are basically just asking more questions that they weren’t asking before. And second, the things like AI overviews, how is that affecting the ecosystem? [..] We’re seeing these features do a really good job of answering simple educational questions, and that’s affecting traffic to some of our non-commercial pages. That has not been the case yet for our monetizing pages, which are fundamentally just a little more complicated, right? Like if you need to shop for a mortgage, for instance, you really need to go through a marketplace experience."

"As we mentioned last quarter, we have seen recovery in organic search traffic in most areas of our business with the exception of Credit Cards and personal loans, and we expect to see this trend continue."

"We dominate apartment search engine results and are number one in organic search for the term 'apartments'."

"We did experience some volatility from Google Search triggered by a periodic algorithm change but traffic from search has recovered so far in Q1 and we've regained momentum. What happened wasn't unusual, referrals from search fluctuate from time to time and they primarily affect logged-out users. This particular swing was interesting because, along with it, we saw a corresponding increase in the query term, Reddit which suggests users are searching with the specific intent of reaching Reddit and this propensity continues to rise."

"Digital circulation revenues accounted for 73% of circulation revenues for the quarter, up from 70% in the prior year. Digital-only subscriptions improved by 13% year-over-year and by 27,000 sequentially, negatively impacted by the phasing of marketing promotions and seasonality, particularly related to students and some industry headwinds from search algorithms."

"We made a big investment in acquiring new staff and really taking a hard look at what we were doing in marketing. And we came up with a lot of things to improve. We are working on the basic search engine optimization, increasing the ranking of keywords. So if customers, prospective customers, are searching for us, we can rank higher in the search and have a stronger ability to grow organically."

"We are looking at improving the ROI of any of our marketing efforts. We increased our domain authority and our site speed. I don't know if you've ever looked at our sites, but they are a lot faster now."

"We also launched new digital buying guides that amplify search engine optimization while providing guests with educational content, beauty tips, and product recommendations. To deepen the meaningful connection we have with beauty enthusiasts, we launched UB Community, a welcoming, inclusive, digital forum for guests to connect, learn, empower, and engage learn, empower, and engage in the immersive world of beauty to foster authentic connections."

"The first impact I'd like to discuss is Google's broad rollout of its AI overviews. This experience keeps users on Google search results page instead of leading them on to third-party sites such as Chegg. It's our belief that the prevalence of AIO will only continue to increase and that Google - in an attempt to maintain market share and shifting from being a search origination point to the destination - [is] disintermediating content sites like Chegg. Second, across our industry, there has been a continued increase in the adoption of free and paid generative AI products. [..] These factors, the speed and scale of Google AIOs rollout and student adoption of generative AI products have negatively impacted our industry and our business."

"In the quarter, we experienced changes to Google that impacted our listing results and made it more competitive to bid on these SEM keywords leading to shifts in visibility and fluctuations in traffic and conversions. Therefore, we cannot spend efficiently on our Wellness business. Because of this, our overall customer acquisition cost accelerated in the quarter, and we proactively pulled back on spend in order to manage these changes, which we believe are the result of Google AI Overview, Google search engine result changes and Google SEM adjustments."

"In intra-quarter, I think we were surprised by the magnitude of Google changes. I'd recommend everyone kind of maybe Google best pet insurance, for example, and see kind of how those new page results have changed. There's now a pretty significant intra page AI offering, which provides a bunch of links to pet insurance companies, which pushes down a lot of SEO listing results."

"Within Pet Food & Treats, we are actively navigating search engine changes from Google and Bing to prioritize AI and paid search above organic. Our organic rankings continue to be best-in-class for fast-growing search terms such as 'best puppy food'."

"Google continue to do what Google does. [..] They've continued to do a bunch of algos and updates through the year. Our teams are really good at source (unclear) into those, particularly on the SEO side. And as a brand, TA is a brand that has some of the deepest and most connected content out there. We continue to do really good work around that. But Google continues to put paid ads in the serve. That's a headwind to SEO, and it's an opportunity on the paid side."

"We really want to be independent of traffic sources. So Google's SEO ranking algorithms, we are happy to benefit from Google free traffic, and we also don't want to be dependent on it. So there are some competitors that have mostly SEO businesses. They'll be mostly free traffic, but they won't be able to flex up and down. That will be different vis-à-vis us [..] but we're also working on our SEO stuff as well and improving that while we speak."

"From a traffic standpoint, I mean, we're driving more traffic from Google than we ever have. So we're not - we're leaning into Google. We're not really seeing traffic headwinds from Google."

"For that far bigger bucket of education-oriented traffic that is less commercial in nature, things got progressively worse throughout the quarter and recently stabilized at a lower level. So, what’s happening there is a renewed push by search engines to incorporate their own answers directly into the search results, like you mentioned AI overviews as an example. For those of you who have been following search over the years, this isn’t really anything new. For example, at one point when you search for the weather, it didn’t show up directly in the results, and eventually a module was inserted there. That trend towards the simpler stuff being pulled into search results is inevitable."

"As we have begun pulling SKUs off, we are seeing SEO rebound. We're up to about 8-ish percent of Overstock being that SEO portion of the traffic, that organic traffic coming in. We've got a long ways to go with that. We're going to continue in a very methodical approach to move those SKUs over. But on the 1st of August, when the site went from being red to blue, and the redirect and we lose all domain authority for Overstock, that is all with Bed Bath, all the buying guides, all the history, all the deep links. All that is on Bed Bath & Beyond. So we're building that site from scratch, and it's going to take a few months to even the end of the year, end of 2025 to get there."

"Now that the AI overview experience is in full circulation, we wanted to revisit the analysis we did in Q3 of 2023 relating to the frequency of AI overviews being presented to users. We analyzed thousands of queries across our key domains that generate the lion's share of our organic search referrals and the percentage of times that an AI overview appeared. It fell to 8%, meaning 92% of the time, the search engine results page did not include an AI overview for the queries that matter to us most. Analysis by other industry experts indicate a similar percentage of overall searches resulting in AI overviews. At this point, we don't see it as a significant change to the search experience, and it's also important to remember that we hypothesize and Google recently confirmed that links and AI overviews get a higher click through than traditional web listing links. I believe the more interesting aspect of AI's impact on search is whether new AI based search competitors can challenge Google's dominance. Google owns 90% of the search market, and over 60% of referrals to the open web derive from Google searches, and with the launch of Perplexity and the beta launch of SearchGPT, we have search engines that employ AI to generate results. The thousands of engineers, once required to operate a search engine, may be obviated with AI."

"On the homeowner side, as I think everybody knows, our SEO has been in a downward path for a while losing a significant amount of ground it once had. We see that as currently getting to a stable place and turning."

"Since Google began to roll out AI Overviews in mid-May, the impact on our traffic has been negligible. Referrals from Google search queries produce less than half of our traffic, and based on our analysis, AI-generated answers are being served on roughly 15% of searches across our categories, with the highest frequency in Health, Technology, and Finance. Click-through rate differentials between pages with and without AI Overviews are minor so far, but it is still early and products change quickly, so the past isn’t prologue. We don’t expect consumers to rely on anonymous advice for their health, finances and cooking, so computers churning out AI “content” should not either. DDM is a scaled, validated source of truth, earning trust by investing in content that’s robustly researched and expert checked, which is why we recommend rocks and glue for art projects, and edible ingredients for cooking. We still believe our brands underpin the most reliable answers to queries, that the best content wins, and AI services will act consistently with their publicly expressed intentions to support the trusted creators on whose content they depend."

"For example, compared to last year our web visits increased by 4% due to a focus on organic search engine optimization and we had a conversion rate uplift by 12%, as a result of optimization of digital customer experiences."

"Generally speaking, we think search is working well when it matches user intent and surfaces the best answers. And by that standard, we and a lot of industry observers felt like things went a bit haywire last quarter. So for example, let's say, you're searching for a small business loan. You ideally, I think, want to comparison shop relevant choices, leveraging a brand you trust. And so if you see a government website explaining what a small business loan is, that doesn't help, neither does a nonprofit website showcasing local grants nor is it helpful to see a regional bank that doesn't do small business loans, right? So we think it's inevitable, some of these kinks get worked out because there are strong commercial incentives for search engines to get it right. They want happy customers who keep coming back so they can sell more search ads."