Market
The search decline is not the same for everyone: 60% for small, 22% for large
Chartbeat data, released in March 2026, breaks the search traffic decline down by site size over the period from December 2024 to December 2025. Small publisher, 1,000 to 10,000 pageviews a day: down 60%. Mid-size publisher, 10,000 to 100,000 a day: down 47%. Large publisher, above 100,000 a day: down 22%. The base aggregates thousands of the platform's client sites.
Two things the source does not deliver, and they change the reading: it does not publish a link to the original report, and it does not separate how much of the decline comes from AI-generated summaries and how much from other search changes. The size of the loss is measured; the cause is not.
The breakdown by size is the useful part, and it contradicts the easy reading. A site between 1 and 8 million pageviews a month works out to 33,000-267,000 a day: that falls in the medium and large bands, which lost 47% and 22%, not in the 60% band. The 60% loss belongs to much smaller sites. Even so, 47% is nearly half the search traffic of a site that usually has one or two people working on monetization.
Our reading: with fewer pageviews arriving, each remaining one has to earn more, and that is a surface problem, not a price problem. Negotiating harder over an auction that happens in the same two places on the page returns little; creating a third place returns more.
Sources and reading
ALM Corp, sobre dados do Chartbeat entregues ao Axios