In the age of AI, web traffic is transforming, but not collapsing.
Total web traffic has remained more or less stable over the past two years, even though AI has reduced visits originating from Google.
Since ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI) burst onto the scene like a bull in a china shop, the traffic websites once received from Google has experienced a dramatic decline. However, despite this fact inevitably causing concern among brands and publishers, the truth is that total web traffic has remained surprisingly stable over the last two years.
The agency Seokratie has taken the trouble to scrutinize the development of web traffic originating from Google and that which, conversely, is rooted in AI models like ChatGPT, during the period between 2024 and 2026. To do so, they analyzed Google Analytics data from 69 German-language websites. Seokratie’s research concludes that web traffic from Google has indeed collapsed over the past two years (though this is hardly surprising to anyone).
The traffic that Google redirects to the analyzed websites has been reduced by almost half between 2024 and 2026, falling from 41% to just 22%. Furthermore, between 2024 and 2025, the number of websites visited through Google dropped by 28.4%, while between 2025 and 2026, this figure suffered an additional decline of 23.3%.
The rise of AI has not affected total web traffic, which has remained stable.
While web traffic from Google has experienced a significant decline, the number of pages visited through searches conducted using Large Language Models (LLM) has increased thirtyfold since 2024. Even so, and despite the conspicuous nature of this increase, the web traffic generated by AI does not in any way close the gap created by the drop in traffic from Google. And today, AI is replacing only 2.5% of the traffic lost from Google. Furthermore, the proportion of web traffic relying on AI is still very small, having increased from 0.01% in 2024 to 0.4% in 2026.
The good news is that total web traffic has remained more or less stable over the last two years. While it saw a slight increase of 1.3% between 2024 and 2025, growth was somewhat more moderate between 2025 and 2026, settling at 0.7%.
It seems, therefore, that people are still visiting websites; they are simply changing the paths they take to reach them. However, it’s worth noting that, although people are increasingly turning to AI for general searches, they still prefer Google for specific product or supplier searches.
This new reality forces brands to work on two fronts. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), or content optimization to make sense in the responses provided by AI, seems essential today. However, GEO doesn’t completely replace traditional SEO; the two disciplines are actually complementary.
Source: www.marketingdirecto.com
