Prior to the launch of AI Overviews in May 2024, Define Media Group’s portfolio of large U.S. publishers averaged 1.7 billion organic search clicks per quarter. Constant. Predictable. The kind of numbers you build a business model on and then stop thinking about, because why would you?
After launch, traffic dropped 16% and never recovered. When Google expanded AI previews in May 2025, the decline accelerated. As of Q4 2025, organic search traffic in this portfolio was down 42% from the pre-AIO baseline.
Nearly half of the organic traffic is gone, coming from a portfolio large enough to be oriented toward the entire publishing industry.
Trading traffic (you produce content, Google sends clicks, ad revenue funds the next production cycle) has been the economic engine of the open web for 20 years. This engine seizes up in plain sight, and the industry’s response has been to debate which dashboard to look at while this is happening.
New interface, same illusion
The first camp did what the SEO industry always does when the terrain changes: they built new tools to measure the shakes.
Quick tracking. LLM visibility dashboards. Response sharing metrics. In less than 18 months, an entire category of vendors has materialized to sell you a number that tells you how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses. It’s the Search Console of the chatbot age, and it has the same comforting implication: if the numbers go up, you win. If it goes down, buy more of what’s making it go up.
I have writing about This before, and I’m going to be frank once again: these tools sell you bullshit with a confidence interval drawn on it in pencil. When a dashboard tells you that your brand “appeared in 73% of relevant AI responses,” what it’s really measuring is: We laid off a few guest on an API, I got some results and counted the mentions. This is not a ranking. It’s a lottery ticket.
The engineers who built these models cannot fully explain why a specific output appeared. But of course, a SaaS tool perched atop Mount Dunning-Kruger with a trend line has it all figured out.
The industry continues to buy because the alternative is to admit that we are flying blind. Questioning the data means telling the room that the “directional” charts in the client deck are noise disguised as information. No one wants to be that person. So the salespeople keep selling, the dashboards keep flashing, and the number doesn’t need to correlate to revenue. It just needs to fluctuate enough to maintain a subscription.
Jono Alderson presented the broader version of this argument in a recent article: Clicks don’t count (and they never did). His take: SEO has always measured the interface rather than the forces behind it. Rankings, traffic, visibility scores. None of these measures were measures of competitiveness. These were measurements of a presentation layer. We spent two decades optimizing what we could see and calling it strategy.
He’s right. And fast tracking is the latest iteration of the same mistake. Old visibility recovery in a trench coat, pretending to be two disciplines.
The second camp is more intellectually serious. Jono’s article is the best version of this argument, and I agree with it more than I’m about to let on.
Its framework: stop measuring the interface, start measuring competitiveness. Six structural dimensions from marketing science validated for decades: integrity of experience, physical availability, mental availability, particularity, reputation, commercial proof. AI systems aggregate signals about brands across the web, not pages in isolation. Truly competitive entities are recommended and highlighted. Visibility is the exit, not the entrance.
I think this is generally correct. I also think there is a crater sized timing problem.
These six dimensions operate on time scales of several years. Developing mental availability is a sustained brand investment. Earning reputation signals is the compound interest of never being terrible. Strengthening distinctive strengths requires buy-in from people who have never heard of Ehrenberg-Bass and won’t read a blog post to find out.
The traffic collapse is happening in neighborhoods.
Tell a publisher who just lost 42% of its search traffic to “strengthen its structural competitiveness” and watch its face. It’s like telling someone whose house is flooding to invest in better drainage. You are not wrong. You’re just not helping.
Jono knows it, it’s to his credit. When someone in their comments asked how to operationalize the framework, their answer was honest: redefine SEO to own these areas, or navigate the organizational politics of working with the teams that do. “Lots of organizational politics, anyway.” That’s the kind of understatement that only someone who’s actually tried would make.
What actually broke?
The measurement debate is a sideshow. The traffic agreement was not a measure. It was the economic basis for content production on the open web.
Google needed content to crawl. Publishers needed distribution to monetize. Produce something worth indexing, Google sends traffic, you convert it into revenue, that revenue funds more content. The loop lasted 20 years. Everyone claimed it was a partnership rather than a dependency, and that claim held up because the numbers worked.
AI insights break the loop. Google synthesizes the response from your content and delivers it directly. The user gets what he needs. Your content is consumed on the Google surface, with Google ads, driving Google’s engagement metrics. You get a quote link that almost no one clicks on and a warm feeling about “brand visibility.”
Google’s vice president of search products, Robby Stein, recently described how they had to “teach the model how to bond.” Linking to publishers was not the default behavior. It had to be reorganized. The natural state of the system is to absorb your content and answer the question. Sending traffic to you is an afterthought, so mining doesn’t look like what it really is: taking your stuff and serving it up as their own.
The case is not uniform. Data from Define shows that breaking news traffic increased by 103% across all Google surfaces, while evergreen content fell by 40%. The Top Stories carousel has been largely protected from AI Overview’s incursion. Evergreen content was not. The how-to guides, the explainers, the reference material, the content categories that built the SEO industry are exactly the categories that AI insights were designed to absorb and replace.
Google selects content that survives the transition. Urgent content always gets clicks because you can’t summarize something that’s still in development. Everything else is increasingly raw material for the responder, and the responder doesn’t pay for the raw materials.
If “competitiveness” replaces traffic as an operational metric, the scope of SEO must change. Jono’s six dimensions mainly belong to product, brand and marketing. The integrity of the experience is the product and the UX. Mental availability is an investment in the brand. Reputation means years without skimping on shortcuts. Trade proof depends on the actual quality of the item you are selling. SEO teams control technical discoverability, content strategy, and site architecture. This is only one level of the competitiveness framework, not the whole building.
So either the discipline expands into a cross-functional strategic role (good luck explaining to the CMO that SEO now owns the branding because recovery models have changed), or it honestly contracts and positions itself as the technical infrastructure that makes competitiveness machine-readable. Either option beats “we’ll get you more organic traffic,” which is a promise that gets older every quarter.
Maybe the clicks weren’t the right metric. Jono makes a compelling argument. We measured the interface and called it the system.
But the clicks paid the bills. They funded editorial teams, justified investments in content, and supported the publishing ecosystem that search engines and AI systems depend on for training data and retrieval sources. Without content to crawl, there is nothing to index. Without content to practice on, there is nothing to synthesize. The irony is apparently lost on the company rolling out AI previews.
Nobody is building a transition strategy. Prompt tracking vendors are selling the new dashboard. Strategists sell a long-term vision. Google won’t help. They’ve broken the market, and their Discover campaign suggests they’d rather build a distribution surface that they completely control than fix one that shares value with publishers. AI companies need content to exist, but haven’t figured out how to finance its production.
Everyone has a framework. Nobody has an answer.
Clicks didn’t count. But something needs to happen. Soon.
More resources:
This article was originally published on The inference.
Featured image: Accogliene Design/Shutterstock
