Summary: We compared organic search traffic across the sites we manage, 2026 versus 2025, to see how AI Overviews and AI search are affecting real websites. Most sites lost traffic, with 73% declining and trade associations hit hardest, though sites tied to events or trending topics held up.
We’ve written before about how AI is changing search and what to do about it. Those posts were about what we expected. This one is about what is actually happening on the sites we manage.
Over the past year, Google rolled out AI Overviews to most searches, and tools like ChatGPT and Claude became real ways people find information. The worry here is obvious: search traffic will drop. If AI answers the question on the results page, fewer people click through to your site. Gartner predicts that organic search traffic to websites will decrease by 50% or more by 2028 as generative AI search scales. We were interested in tracking how this was affecting the sites we manage, so we looked at our own numbers.
Methodology
We compared organic search sessions for our client sites across two periods: January 1 through May 31, 2026, against the same five months in 2025. Every site runs Google Analytics, so the data is consistent. We’re sharing aggregate trends only, not individual client results.
One caveat up front: this is a relatively small sample (around 70 sites), and it’s skewed toward nonprofits, trade associations, and higher education, which reflects the kinds of organizations we work with. Read it as a real-world snapshot, not a definitive study.
What we found
Key Findings
73%
of sites lost organic traffic
SITES AFFECTED
-15.8%
change for a typical site
MEDIAN CHANGE
-7.2%
across all client sites combined
TOTAL VOLUME
Most sites we manage lost organic traffic, but the picture is messier than “everything went down.”
Across all sites, total organic sessions fell 7.2%, from about 9.08 million to 8.43 million. That sounds modest until you look at how it’s distributed. Nearly three quarters of sites (73%) saw organic traffic decline. The typical site, measured by median, was down 15.8%.
The reason the total drop looks smaller than the typical site’s drop is that a handful of sites grew sharply and pulled the average up. The sites that grew usually weren’t doing anything magic with SEO. They were covering topics that got more attention this year than last, often something that became front-page news or a live news cycle that didn’t exist in the prior period. That’s a tailwind from the broader search trend, not evidence that AI left their traffic alone.
Strip those out and the pattern is clear: for most sites, organic search delivered meaningfully less traffic than it did a year ago.
How it broke down by site type
The damage was not spread evenly. We sorted sites into four types, and the differences were significant.
Trade Associations
Trade Associations
HARDEST HIT
86%
of sites lost traffic
-44.4%
typical site (median)
-28.9
total volume
Trade associations got hit hardest. These are industry and advocacy sites built around explaining topics, answering questions, and publishing reference material. That is exactly the kind of content AI Overviews are built to summarize. The typical site was down 44.4%, and total volume for the group fell 28.9%. When someone searches a factual question your site used to answer, the AI now answers it first.
Higher Education
Higher Education
MODERATE IMPACT
100%
of sites lost traffic
-7.6%
typical site (median)
-6.0%
total volume
Higher education sites all declined, though less severely. Total volume was down 6.0%, with a typical decline around 7.6%. These tend to be large sites where branded and high-intent searches (program names, applications, logins) hold up better than informational pages.
Nonprofits
Nonprofits
NEARLY FLAT
-2.2%
total volume (nearly flat)
-6.2%
typical site (median)
~1/3
of sites actually grew
Nonprofits were the most mixed group. As a group, total volume was nearly flat, down just 2.2%, but the typical site was still down 6.2%. The averages are skewed by a few sites with major gains, and those gains were almost always tied to a topic that surged in the news this year rather than steady search demand.
Company sites
Company sites
MOST VARIABLE
50/50
split up vs down
-19.6%
total volume
Small
most variable group
Company sites split evenly, with half up and half down. Total volume fell 19.6%, driven mostly by declines at a couple of larger sites. This was our smallest and most variable group, so we’d be careful reading too much into it.
What this means
If your site is built to answer questions, you are most exposed. The sites that held up best were either large branded destinations or sites whose traffic was tied to something AI can’t replace, like an event, a community, or a transaction, or sites riding a topic that simply got more attention this year.
This is not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to pay attention. And the takeaway is not “abandon search for AI.” It’s that you now have to optimize for both. People are still searching, and search still drives real traffic to most of these sites. They’re also increasingly asking AI tools the same questions, and you want to show up in both places. We walk through how to do that in our AI optimization guide.