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:
- Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are being reported as having the biggest impact on traffic
- Reddit saw search referrals fall by more than one million a week in October
- Group 1 Automotive says around a third of automotive searches now happen through AI bots
- AI and agent traffic remains a small share for most, though The RealReal and GoDaddy say it is growing off that base
Handmade and unique items marketplace
When you think about buyers and their agents, the Etsy brand is a signal of trust that gives you confidence that not only you're getting something from a human, that item is special and unique.
That is what Etsy has always stood for. We already see that as an important factor in our current partnerships with AI discovery platforms. The fact that items come from Etsy is an important signal of quality and drives that traffic and engagement that we see from those channels.
But we're also engaging really proactively with partners to really make sure that our sellers' items are showing up wherever the shopping journey begins, and we're seeing really encouraging signals there, though I will just reiterate that it's very early days in terms of agentic discovery.
Workflow management and CRM
And I think the industry is going through a shift where previously it was about displaying ads for people doing search or surfing online. We're shifting now to more decision-making and agent recommendation. And I think over time, it will shift more towards that. We're very focused on that. We have teams working on that, on those partnerships and discovery.
What that means in real terms is how do we really expose our content and our design catalog to all the LLMs, to all the frontier models, which we are actively doing, as well as how we really optimize and change our marketplaces for agentic and agents to be able to easily and seamlessly shop on the platform.
So things are changing as we speak and every day there are new protocols like the UCP coming out. So we are very much staying on top of all these trends and adapting our marketplaces for the new AI wave.
The traffic continues to increase.
One of the things that we're really focused on right now is large language model searches. Those are like ⅓ of automotive searches right now are being done through AI bots. And that's a different — that takes different marketing. It takes setting up your websites very differently. Each different chatbot, whether it's Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT, rely on different criteria than, say, Google used to. And so we are really putting a lot of focus and energy around how to optimize for those AI bot searches.
Last minute holidays, hotels, flights and city breaks
AI platforms increasingly drive travel discovery from inspiration to the destination choice and simplify the final choice by comparing options in real time. We're part of that. And by the way, we will see in a few moments that we are integrated exactly in those moments. [..] It's a role that was traditionally held by Google and by social media platforms, and by the way, they're not going away.
Google is still there, especially with AI mode and the integration of Gemini. Social media platforms [are] also there for inspiration, and now AI platforms basically add as an additional customer acquisition channel, as an additional demand generation channel for us.
To be very clear, the numbers that we're getting from this integration and the other are still pretty small as for everyone in the industry. But I think it's important to prove the point that if and when demand goes there, we are already there ready to take advantage of that. So if and when demand moves away from Google or social media platform where historically we were getting our customer acquisition, for us it would be just a new channel where we are present.
Freelance services marketplace
For 17 years, Fiverr built one of the best performance marketing engines on the Internet on top of search. That world is changing fast.
More and more journeys now start and end inside an AI assistant. Organic clicks are falling across the web and acquisition costs are rising for everyone who depends on them.
We expect that pressure on marketplace traffic to continue into 2027.
So on SEO, traditional SEO, or the impact of SEO, is decreasing to the point where it's going to be dead very, very soon.
And the reason is that when you have less traffic coming to traditional search, or the traffic that comes to traditional search wants the Gemini component, wants the AI component rather than the links, there's a need to increase ad density. I think we heard that coming from the largest share search engine.
When there is very high ad density, there's no space for organic results. And so the impact of SEO is likely to decrease to the point where it's no longer important.
Social bookmarking platform
We have not seen any impact in our UCAN engagement since the launch of some of those popular consumer agent experiences, because those tend to be more horizontal and users are coming to us for a specific purpose around shopping, and one where we're able to really drive experiences that are deeply personalized to them and they feel like are letting them control those experiences.
So, said simply, users are happy to automate away drudgery. They don't want to automate away their joy. They don't want to automate away their entertainment and their pastime. And so we've done some research on this. There's some new research that was conducted by YouGov on behalf of Pinterest that more than 8 in 10 Americans say they'd miss something about shopping if AI did it for them, from discovering things that they weren't looking for to figuring out what they like.
So this is why at Pinterest, we've been building for all the wonderful parts of shopping that people don't want to give up, in the same way that people don't seek to automate away their entertainment. And so that's been at the very core of that deepening engagement.
Discuss and share anything
Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3 with the decline accelerating later in the quarter. The biggest impact was on logged out and web traffic, but some of the impact flows through to logged in and app traffic since search referral is a common source of reengagement for users.
During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than one million referrals on average per week.
The biggest one is the AI Overviews or AI Mode. Both have evolved a lot. And particularly recently, they appear to be expanding them quite aggressively both in the U.S. and outside. So what started as a feature is now the full search experience. And at the minimum, it pushes everyone down the search page. And then on top of that, the experiences themselves are not traffic drivers.
There's a second factor, which we believe our machine-translated content is also being ranked lower. So this primarily would affect us outside the U.S.
We believe that this [consumer agent] traffic will be largely incremental to eBay. While it's — I would say it's very, very small today — it does bring over new and reactivated buyers at a higher rate than other similar channels on the platform.
Buy and sell designer items
We lead when consumers turn to AI to look for pre-owned luxury.
The agentic traffic is still pretty small share relative to traditional search, but I'll say it's growing.
And we're, I'll say, well positioned because of the depth of products that we have and the depth of data when you think of one-for-one items, hundreds of attributes behind each item is why we show up so prominently in AI search today, but it's an area of increasing focus for us.
So we're really focused on building for both sides, making sure AI agents find us and making the on-site — our own on-site experience — smarter for buyers to come to us directly.
In Q3, Google quickly pivoted towards AI mode for the bulk of search in our space. Based on early data we observed, we believe the impact to our traffic has been small, which speaks to the resilience of our direct traffic and brand.
Over the last quarter, we did see a jump in our traffic coming from LLMs. And it was on a small base, but it was a good result based on the efforts we have made. We still have a long ways to go.
