Organic search traffic fell 2.5% YoY, new data shows

Organic search traffic is down just 2.5% year over year – nowhere near the 25% to 60% declines often cited in industry commentary. That’s one big takeaway from Graphite’s new analysis using Similaweb data from more than 40,000 of the largest US websites.

This finding challenges the notion that productive AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly changing the landscape of traditional search and dynamic SEO.

What’s going on. Surveys, anecdotes, and case studies have fueled claims that organic traffic has fallen and that large language models are taking away demand from search engines. The graphite data tells a different story.

• Using the same web traffic data, the study compared organic search traffic to the top 40,000 US websites from February to December 2024 and January to November 2025. The result was a modest, not dramatic, decline.
• Google’s statements support this view. In August 2025, the company said the volume of organic clicks from Google Search was “stable year-over-year.”

In numbers. Traffic patterns vary by site size. The largest sites, including the top 10, increased organic traffic by about 1.6%. The decline is concentrated among medium-sized publishers estimated to be between the top 100 and 10,000.

• Organic SEO traffic: -2.5% YoY
• Total search engine traffic (2025): +0.4%
• Google traffic (2025): +0.8%
• Organic vs paid clicks: ~90% organic, ~10% ads
• AI overview CTR impact: -35% if any
• AI overview: ~30% of SERPs

AI overview: impact, not collapse. AI overviews reduce click-through rates when they appear, but their reach is less than many think.

• An overview of AI appears in about 30% of questions, mostly informational.
• Commercial and transactional keywords are not affected much.

Google Ads are not “stealing” organic clicks. Another common claim is that Google is diverting traffic from organic results to paid ads. The data shows only a small change.

• The share of clicks to ads increased by almost 2 percent.
• Organic results still generate about 10 times more clicks than paid placement.

Why do we care. SEO is still a big channel. AI is changing the way results appear and the way users interact with information, but the need for search has not yet collapsed. The real change is that SEO is fragmented. More SERP features, more AI-driven answers, and more competition are just a few clicks away from informational queries. Strategy is now more important than ever.

About the data. The analysis uses the same web traffic estimates for more than 40,000 major US websites. These measurements include user opt-in panels, ISP and carrier data, public web signals, and direct measurements from participating sites to visitor models and traffic sources for measurement. To ensure accuracy, Graphite compared the same web trends with first-party Google Search Console and Google Analytics data across multiple sites and found an average correlation of 0.86.

Analysis. Debunking the Myth That Search Is Dying