Email and direct traffic are replacing organic search
Organic search traffic is melting faster than inflation eats your dollar. Between August 2024 and August 2026, organic visits fell 13 percent in the US and 24 percent in France. During the same period, inflation reduced purchasing power by about 6 percent. Your traffic is vanishing at 2-4x the rate of your currency.
Kevin Indig at Growth Memo analyzed Similarweb data to find out where those clicks went. The answer matters if you are building acquisition strategy for the next two years.
The Numbers Behind the Decline
Not every site is suffering equally. Publishers lost roughly 42 percent of organic traffic in both markets. The smallest quartile of sites stayed flat. The split suggests something structural: Google is showing more and sneakier search ads, and it has become pickier about which sites appear in results. Blaming every lost click on AI is an avoidance mechanism.
The data comes from comparing January through August 2026 against the same months in 2025. Indig excluded sites with missing months to keep the comparison clean.
Email Grew Faster Than Almost Anything Else
Two channels stand out in the Similarweb sample: email and paid search. Email visits grew 16.3 percent in the US and 17.0 percent in France. Paid search grew 20.8 percent and 20.3 percent respectively.
In absolute terms, email added more visits than paid search. Email brought in 3.94 billion additional visits in the US versus 3.70 billion from paid search. In France, email added 462 million visits versus 401 million from paid search.
There is a wrinkle in the paid search numbers. One domain, googleadservices.com, has an outsized effect. It is part of Google’s advertising infrastructure, not a conventional website. When Indig excluded it, paid search growth fell from 20.8 percent to 13.5 percent in the US and from 20.3 percent to 10.7 percent in France. The drop could reflect changes in ad activity, routing, measurement, or some combination.
The median site tells a complementary story. The median US site grew email traffic by 14.7 percent and paid search by 17.4 percent. Email’s growth extends beyond a few giant sites.
Some of that email traffic includes functional messages like order confirmations and notifications. That is traffic, not necessarily new customers. But Indig argues email is the most portable, unfiltered asset a brand can own. No other channel lets you reach someone without an intermediary.
Direct Traffic Held Up Better Than Organic
Direct traffic is the largest channel by volume: 43.5 percent in the US and 39 percent in France when weighted by the median site. It is shrinking slightly, down 2.7 percent in the US and 3.1 percent in France year-over-year between January and August.
But Direct held up significantly better than organic search. From August 2024 to August 2026, combined Direct visits fell 3.4 percent in the US and 5.3 percent in France. Organic visits fell 13.2 percent and 23.4 percent across the same sites.
Size matters here too. The median small site gained 14.4 percent in Direct traffic in the US and 21.2 percent in France. The median large site lost 13.0 percent and 7.1 percent. The pattern mirrors organic search: small sites are holding ground while large sites bleed.
Direct is a messy bucket. It includes dark social, non-referral advertising, word of mouth, and visits with unrecognized sources. Attribution changes can also shift numbers. When OpenAI shipped GPT-6 in early October, links stopped carrying referrer or UTM tags for about a week. Adobe measured roughly 31,000 fewer daily ChatGPT visits and 26,000 more daily Direct visits across 500 pages. That was a bug, but it illustrates how fragile the label can be.
Indig remains bullish on Direct for one reason: a visit from someone who remembers your brand and types in your URL does not pay a search ad click fee. Building that familiarity takes investment, but when other channels deteriorate, Direct starts to look more attractive.
Industry Mix Varies Wildly
The channel mix changes by industry and by country. In the US, retail and marketplace sites gained 26.6 percent in email visits and 24.9 percent in paid search, while organic grew just 7.0 percent. News and information sites lost 15.1 percent in organic and 13.6 percent in Direct, while paid search grew 29.8 percent.
In France, retail and marketplace sites gained 20.7 percent in email and 14.5 percent in paid search, while organic fell 10.7 percent. The mix differs even within the same industry.
Selected examples show the divergence. Brave, TikTok, Pinterest, and Canva all grew Direct visits in both markets. Claude.ai grew much faster from a smaller base. From January 2025 to August 2026, Claude’s average daily Direct visits grew 990.0 percent in the US and 1,474.7 percent in France. The average site-level gain was 123.0 percent and 94.5 percent. The median site declined 9.3 percent and 14.2 percent.
What This Means for Your Strategy
Indig’s takeaway is straightforward: growth teams should pay more attention to email and direct. SEO before AI was scalable enough that companies built foundations on it. That is no longer possible because the AI search experience is less unified for every user.
The actionable question becomes: How can you get users in the habit of visiting directly, and how can you provide unique content through channels like email to keep them engaged?
Email gives brands a reason to build an audience they can reach again. Direct gives them a reason to make returning worthwhile. Paid search gives them a way to capture demand, as long as the cost makes sense. The channels that grew while organic shrank are the channels that reward audience building over algorithmic gambling.
When This Works
- You are a small site: the data shows small sites held flat in organic and gained in Direct while large sites lost heavily.
- You have an owned email list: functional emails count as traffic, and you control the reach.
- You can invest in brand familiarity: Direct traffic is love at second sight, not first acquisition.
When It Does Not
- You depend entirely on organic search for acquisition: the 13-24 percent decline is real and concentrated in large sites.
- You have no email program: the 16-17 percent growth in email traffic happened without you.
- You cannot measure Direct meaningfully: the bucket includes everything from dark social to attribution bugs.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.
