noisediverMar 8
petersuber

"The Internet's Most-Read Tech Publications Have Lost 58% of Their Google Traffic Since 2024."
https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse

Related: Human visitors to Wikipedia declined by about 8% in 2025.
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7117795

PS: I'm not surprised that #AI tools are having these effects. They answer questions directly and cut the need to click through to sources, even when they link to sources.

But I haven't yet seen data on the effects at academic journals. Have you?

#Search

Tech Publications Lost 58% of Google Traffic Since 2024 | Growtika

We tracked the organic search traffic of CNET, Wired, The Verge, TechRadar, and six others from early 2024 to today. Combined, they lost 65 million monthly visits.

Growtika
Mar 8 at 2:19pmWeb
Show threadChristian ZimmermannMar 8
@petersuber For RePEc, we see a huge surge in traffic, but we strongly suspect it is from AI bots, not humans. Difficult to say whether human traffic is up. Full text downloads are about level. Some details: https://blog.repec.org/2025/11/10/ai-issues-in-repec/
AI issues in RePEc

This post has three updates Over the past year, various RePEc services have been struggling with issues stemming from artificial intelligence robots (AI bots), and this post is a short summary of w…

The RePEc Blog
Show threadCésar Pallares Mar 8

@czimm_economist
I have Listened some reports from universities that the usage of academic resources has declined.

Additionally, the trends in stock market for publishers is telling that investors have doubts for the their future
@petersuber

Show threadFrannovalMar 8
@petersuber I don't know. I visit those sites all the time, but never ever by clicking through Google. I bet I'm not the only person who does that. The "update" in the article acknowledges some of the methodological problems with how they gathered/analyzed their data, but it barely scratches the surface of those problems. E.g., I wonder how many users Google has lost since 2024. Really stupid study, although I'm perfectly willing to believe that all these sites have lost some traffic to people who are too lazy and to Jun concerned about accuracy to do anything but ask an LLM