Organic search is down 13% in the US — but the story is messier than that
If your organic traffic is down, you’re probably blaming AI. Kevin Indig at Growth Memo just published a 10,000-domain Similarweb analysis that says the picture is more complicated, and the nuance matters if you’re deciding where to spend your time and budget.
The headline numbers
Organic search visits dropped 13.2% in the US (19.9 billion to 17.3 billion) and 24.4% in France (4 billion to 3 billion) between August 2024 and August 2026. As a share of total traffic, US organic fell from 20.5% to 18.3% and French organic fell from 27.3% to 23.1%.
Those are real declines. But aggregate numbers hide three different stories depending on which kind of site you run.
Three concentrations you need to know
1. Size matters more than you think. Large sites took the hardest hits: down 13.5% in the US and 27.4% in France. Small sites (bottom quartile) actually gained organic traffic in aggregate: up 19.3% in the US and 42.2% in France. The caveat: remove the 100 biggest small-site gainers in each country and that combined growth turns negative. The typical small site was roughly flat, up 2.7% in the US and down 1.9% in France.
2. Publishers are getting crushed. The dataset shows publishers lost 41.5% of organic traffic in the US and 42.5% in France over two years. Strip publishers out and the US decline shrinks from 13.2% to 7.8%. Almost half of the US aggregate drop comes from one business model: content that competes directly with AI answers.
3. Topic verticals vary widely. Health, food, news, and adult-focused sites decline faster than average. Entertainment and gaming declined much slower in the US.
It’s not only AI doing the damage
Google reported ad revenue of $63.3 billion in Q2 2026, up 16.8% year over year. That matters because paid search is eating into organic territory. In October 2025, Google started grouping up to four text ads under a sticky “Sponsored results” header. Research from Stat found the average organic result now sits below the desktop viewport on common head terms, and ad blocks have doubled in size across a sample of 46,000 head terms since June.
The data backs this up. Over the same two-year window where organic fell 13.2% in the US, paid search traffic grew 21%. In France, paid grew 17.3% while organic dropped 24.4%. Google also reported paid clicks up 13% and average CPC up 3% in Q2 2026.
Indig’s estimate: paid search traffic growth offsets about 36.6% of organic losses in the US and about 6.7% in France. Algorithm updates are also a factor. A January 2026 Google update wiped rankings for many sites, and Indig notes this is visible in the aggregate organic traffic chart.
AI referral traffic: fastest growing, still tiny
AI referral traffic has the strongest growth rate of any channel in the dataset. It reached 2.85% of SEO traffic in the US and 2.44% in France. In absolute terms, it accounts for roughly one in 200 total visits, or 0.5% of all traffic.
Indig’s take: even if AI referral traffic doubles or triples over the next 12 months, the impact on total visit counts is negligible. The more useful question for operators is whether your brand appears when buyers are researching your category, then connecting that visibility to business outcomes.
The operator takeaway
The framing Indig uses is worth keeping: SEO is like a melting ice cube, and how fast it melts is not completely out of your hands. If you run a small non-publisher site, the aggregate data says your situation is likely less dire than the headlines suggest. If you run a publisher or a large domain in health or food, the losses are real and the causes are multiple: AI answers, bigger ad blocks, and algorithm updates all share responsibility.
Before cutting your SEO budget, separate your benchmark from the aggregate. Publisher losses are not your losses unless you are a publisher.
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.
