Search traffic is collapsing, direct traffic is booming: here's my data
Love it or hate it, AI is having a big impact on the world. If you are involved in managing a website, you probably have noticed the indirect effect of AI in your website analytics data. One obvious way that this manifests itself is in declining levels of overall traffic.
Tools like Google’s AI search summaries are obliterating traffic for many websites as people find all the information they need without needing to click through (and that’s assuming that there is even a link to click on). A Pew Research Center study from last July found that users were much less likely to click on links when their Google search results had an AI summary compared to search results without one.
Direct traffic
In a blog post from January, I wrote about the different ‘buckets’ of traffic that website analytics platforms record. This includes obvious things like ‘social media’ and ‘search engine’ traffic, but also the broader (and somewhat nebulous) category of ‘direct’ traffic. Historically, this was really referring to people who went directly to your website by using browser bookmarks, clicking on links in emails, or even just by typing a web address.
Direct traffic is effectively any traffic that cannot be put into any of the other buckets. My earlier post focused on the subset of direct traffic which has been referred to as ‘dark social’. This will include people who click on links in messaging apps like WhatsApp…these apps don’t leave any digital fingerprints so the data is recorded as ‘direct’.
AI traffic
However, traffic from AI tools is increasingly showing up in the ‘direct’ bucket too, and this is something that has been capturing a lot of attention recently, e.g. see:
The AI Traffic Attribution Crisis: Why Your Analytics Are Wrong (Updated With Real Data) - November 2025
The 70% Problem: Your AI Traffic Is Hiding in GA4 Direct - June 2026
Your AI Traffic Is Hiding: A Practical Guide to Tracking ChatGPT, Claude, and More - June 2026
Even though analytics platforms like Matomo are trying to now identify AI traffic, it’s not easy and people like me who spend a lot of time looking at website data, are finding it harder to get a clear picture of how websites are being used.
Here is some actual data from three websites that I manage. The chart below shows the percentage of traffic that is recorded as search engine or direct at three different time periods (the first six months of 2024, 2025, and 2026). The websites are anonymised.
Click to enlarge
In all three cases, these websites have seen a big decline in the share of traffic coming from search engines and a corresponding big rise in the share of direct traffic. I’m only focusing on the share of traffic from different sources rather than the total level of traffic.
It’s possible that this rise in direct traffic has nothing to do with AI…but that’s the problem with direct traffic, it’s all unknowable.
If this change is largely driven by AI (which seems reasonable) then it means that the future of managing a website is going to be a very different experience. We might expect to see declining levels of overall traffic. We might also expect to see that the vast majority of traffic is direct traffic.
The quality of your traffic is going to matter much more than quantity but identifying high-quality vs low-quality traffic is another challenge altogether.
