Search Traffic Is Drying Up—Here’s What That Means for Your Landing Pages

Search Traffic Is Drying Up — What That Means for Your Landing Pages

Google search has long been a reliable funnel for attracting visitors. But lately, you may have noticed a disturbing trend: the steady stream of organic search traffic to your site is slowing to a trickle. In other words, search traffic is drying up. What's going on, and where did all those clicks go? The rules of the game are changing — much of the information people need is now being served directly on search results pages (often by AI), with fewer users clicking through to websites. This shift has profound implications for how growth, product, and marketing leaders approach their landing pages and inbound strategy.

In this article, we'll break down why search traffic is shrinking, explore the data behind this trend, and discuss what it means for your company’s landing pages and customer acquisition strategy. Most importantly, we'll outline how you can adapt and thrive in an era where getting a click from Google is becoming the exception, not the rule.

The New Reality of Shrinking Search Traffic

Not long ago, ranking on the first page of Google meant a surge of clicks to your site. Today, a top position is no guarantee of traffic. Multiple studies confirm that a majority of Google searches now end without any click to external websites – so-called "zero-click searches." In 2024, nearly 60% of Google searches (mobile and desktop combined) ended with the user finding their answer on Google itself and never clicking through to any other site. In the United States, only about 36% of searches result in a click to a non-Google website, meaning nearly two-thirds of search queries stay inside Google’s ecosystem. In short, the traditional flow of users from search engine to your landing page is breaking down.

Figure: Distribution of Google search outcomes in 2024. An estimated 58.5% of searches resulted in no click (“zero-click searches”), and only around 36% of searches led to a click on an external website. Google captures the rest via its own properties or repeated searches.

Several forces are driving this decline in outbound clicks from search:

• Google’s Answer-Rich Results: Over the years, Google has added featured snippets, knowledge panels, maps, shopping units, and other rich results that give answers directly on the results page. Users often don't need to click a link to get what they need. For example, a search for a definition, weather, or a quick fact will likely show the info immediately on Google. Your site never even enters the picture.

• Zero-Click and Self-Contained Searches: This trend of keeping users on Google has accelerated. Google now answers many queries itself or funnels users to its own services (YouTube, Maps, etc.). By one analysis, nearly 30% of all clicks from Google go to Google’s own properties (YouTube, Maps, Google Shopping, etc.). Add that to the ~60% of searches with no clicks, and very little is left for everyone else. In effect, Google is increasingly both the gatekeeper and the destination.

• Rise of AI Answers: Most recently, AI has delivered the knockout punch to organic search traffic. Google’s new generative AI “Overview” answers (as part of Search Generative Experience) and similar AI answers on Bing or other engines mean users can ask a complex question and read a synthesized answer without clicking through to any website. Early data is alarming: when Google’s AI Overview is present, the click-through rate for the top organic result drops dramatically. MailOnline (a major news site) saw its #1 organic link get 56% fewer clicks on desktop searches whenever an AI answer appeared. Even when their link was cited inside the AI box, they still saw around a 44% drop in CTR. In one illustrative case, a query that had previously sent ~6,000 visits to the site yielded only about 100 visits after Google introduced an AI summary for it. These AI-generated answers are effectively stealing the click that would have gone to the top-ranked page.

Figure: Impact of Google’s AI Overviews on the click-through rate (CTR) of the #1 organic result. An analysis of 300,000 keywords found the top result’s CTR dropped by about 34.5% on average when an AI summary was present. In March 2025, the actual CTR for position #1 was dramatically lower than the historical forecasted CTR, due to users getting answers from AI without clicking through.

• Changing User Behavior: It’s not just Google’s presentation of results — user habits themselves are shifting. Consumers have grown accustomed to getting instant answers. Many are skipping traditional search for certain tasks, instead using voice assistants, ChatGPT/Bing Chat, or even searching directly on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, or TikTok. One tech CEO recently noted that she now does 40% of her searches through various AI chatbots, and only 60% on Google, a massive change in just the last year. This anecdote reflects a broader trend: people are beginning to treat AI Q&A tools as substitute “answer engines” for queries that previously would have been Google searches. When your potential customers ask a chatbot for advice or use Reddit to find recommendations, your website might not even get a chance to appear.

The result of all these factors is clear: organic search referrals are declining across many industries. News and media publishers have been hit especially hard (as the AI examples above show), but the pattern extends to others. For instance, e-commerce companies saw a 9% drop in search referral traffic year-over-year in May 2025. Overall, publishers and site owners are reporting significant organic traffic drops in the wake of these changes. One analysis found that organic search traffic in April 2025 was roughly 55% lower than it was in April 2022. And several digital publishers told Digiday that after Google rolled out its AI-driven results in 2024, their Google traffic fell 30–50% practically overnight. In other words, the free ride from Google is rapidly slowing down.

Why This Matters for Your Landing Pages and Funnel

If you're leading growth, product, or marketing at a B2B SaaS company, you might be asking: "So what? Why does a dip in search traffic matter to my landing pages?" The answer is that it fundamentally challenges one of the main ways potential customers find you. Fewer clicks from search means fewer prospects entering the top of your funnel via content and SEO. Here are the key implications:

• Fewer Bites at the Apple: Every landing page or blog post on your site that relied on Google for traffic will, on average, be seeing fewer visitors. If you used to get 1,000 visits a month from organic search to a key landing page, that number might be steadily shrinking through no fault of your own. As a concrete example, even a content powerhouse like HubSpot saw its blog’s search traffic drop dramatically in 2024, due in part to Google’s changing algorithms and features. HubSpot’s blog went from being 77% of their site’s search traffic (nearly 4 million visits) in January 2024 to just 42% of search traffic (about 1.1 million visits) by December. That illustrates how quickly an SEO-driven content strategy can lose steam. For a smaller B2B SaaS firm, a similar drop could mean a serious lead generation shortfall.

• Landing Page Performance May Appear to Erode: You might notice conversion rates on certain pages dropping, not because the page itself got worse, but because the mix of visitors has changed. Suppose your landing page once attracted a steady flow of high-intent visitors from a specific informational query on Google. If Google now answers that query directly or pushes a large Wikipedia blurb or AI answer on top, far fewer people reach your page. Those who do arrive might be coming from other channels (social media, direct, referrals) with different intent or demographics. Your analytics might show a dip in traffic and possibly skewed engagement metrics, which can lead to misinterpreting that the page or offer isn’t effective — when the real culprit is the drying up of the traffic source.

• Cost of Acquisition Could Rise: Many SaaS marketers have long treated organic search as a “free” (or at least high ROI) acquisition channel. It takes investment to create content and optimize SEO, but the traffic itself doesn’t have a direct cost per click like ads do. With that channel sending fewer visitors, you may feel pressure to replace the lost traffic with paid acquisition or other efforts, which can raise your overall customer acquisition cost (CAC). In short, if you were getting 100 free trials a month via SEO and now you only get 50, you might need to pay for the other 50 through ads or other campaigns.

• The Funnel is Being Short-Circuited: Often, landing pages serve as the first touchpoint, capturing interest and guiding a user to sign up or request a demo. But what if the user never needs to visit your landing page to get the basic information? Increasingly, prospects can learn a lot about your product or service from search engine results alone (or AI chat recommendations) without visiting your site. Google’s AI summaries might even pull in content from your site or from reviewers and display it above the fold. The user might only click through when they are much closer to a decision, or they might not click at all if, say, Google or Bing’s AI lists a few product names with summaries. This means less opportunity for you to tell your story and differentiate yourself via your landing page content. The search engine or AI might have already done the storytelling (potentially imperfectly) on your behalf.

• Analytics and Attribution Get Murkier: As search evolves, you’ll need to reinterpret your analytics. For example, Google Search Console might show that your pages still appear for many searches (impressions), but the clicks are declining. Marketers are calling this the "great decoupling" of impressions from clicks. You might rank and be visible, but users don't click through like they used to. Additionally, some traffic may start coming from odd new referral sources (e.g. bard.google.com or Bing’s chatbot) – these are instances where an AI assistant actually did send a visitor. Such referrals are tiny right now, but they’re growing rapidly (one report noted traffic from generative AI tools to retail sites surged over 1200% between mid-2024 and early 2025, albeit from a very small base). This all makes it trickier to track the true path by which customers discover you. Traditional attribution models, which give a lot of credit to organic search, may need updating as “organic search” traffic figures no longer tell the full story.

In short, shrinking search traffic isn’t just an SEO problem — it’s a strategic growth problem. Less organic traffic means fewer top-of-funnel opportunities, a potentially weaker flow of leads, and the need to rethink how you get in front of your audience. For product leaders, it also hints that relying on the old “build it and they will come (via Google)” approach is riskier now; even a great product needs new strategies to get discovered.

Adapting to the New Search Landscape

It's not all doom and gloom. Yes, the easy wins from SEO are harder to come by, but the flip side is that this forces us to up our game and diversify. Here are strategic steps and opportunities for adapting to the era of declining search traffic:

1. Double Down on Brand and Community. When information is commoditized and served instantly by Google, your brand can be a key differentiator. We’re seeing that branded searches (e.g. “Notion pricing” or “Acme Corp case study”) are among the most resilient to zero-click losses. An executive at MailOnline put it bluntly: “Focusing on the brand has never, ever, ever been more important.” If users specifically seek out your brand, Google can’t easily interpose an AI answer in between. Cultivate an audience that knows you and actively comes looking — through content marketing that builds thought leadership, through engaging in industry communities, and through nurturing your user base into evangelists. The goal is to have prospects who skip the generic search and instead go directly to your site or search your brand name along with their query. That might mean investing more in community building, webinars, podcasts, newsletters, and social media – channels where you can interact directly and drive traffic that isn’t solely at Google’s mercy.

2. Rethink Your Content Strategy (Quality over Quantity). If a lot of your SEO content was generic or readily answerable (think “What is X” definitions or trivial FAQs), it's likely underperforming now. AI can answer those basic questions without a click, and Google is favoring what it deems the most authoritative source (or just keeping the answer). Instead, focus on content that AI and competitors can't easily replicate. This could include: original research, unique data insights, deep expertise, or niche topics that aren't well covered elsewhere. For example, rather than a generic “Beginner’s Guide to OKRs” that could be summarized by an AI, create a piece like “How We Implemented OKRs at a 100-Person SaaS Company (Lessons Learned)”. The latter has a point of view and real experience behind it, which not only draws readers but is also harder for an AI to summarize without losing the nuance. Additionally, consider content formats that encourage clicks. Tools, calculators, interactive demos, and videos can compel users to click through because the value is in the interaction, not just the text answer. In short, pivot from volume to value: fewer, richer pieces of content that establish your authority and give visitors a reason to engage directly.

3. Optimize for Answer Engines (AEO is the new SEO). Just as companies spent years optimizing for search engines (SEO), now we must optimize for answer engines. This means ensuring that if an AI or a rich snippet is pulling info from somewhere, it might as well be your site. Some tactics to consider:

• Implement structured data and schema markup on your pages. This helps search engines (and AI systems that ingest web content) understand your content context. For a SaaS company, marking up things like product information, FAQs, pricing, reviews, and how-to content can increase the likelihood that your data is featured in search results or voice answers.

• Create concise, factual answers within your content for common questions in your niche (without giving everything away). For example, have a clear one-sentence answer to a question, followed by a more detailed explanation. This way, if Google or Bing excerpt something, the user sees your authoritative answer (with a citation to your site). Even if you don’t get the click, you get brand exposure. And if the user wants more, your site is the obvious place to go.

• Look into emerging tools and practices for monitoring how your content is used in AI summaries. For instance, there are ways to track if your pages are being served in Google’s AI results (such as spikes of brief visits from Google’s experimental domains). Staying informed will help you adjust your content to remain visible.

• Consider formats like FAQ pages or knowledge bases that are directly aimed at answering questions. This content might feed both traditional search snippets and AI answers. If you become the referenced authority that the AI pulls from, you gain indirect traffic and credibility. (Keep in mind, though, the AI might not always attribute clearly — but being absent altogether is worse.)

4. Invest in Other Traffic Channels. If organic search traffic was your primary acquisition channel, it’s time to diversify. That might include:

• Referrals and Partnerships: As Google referrals fall, others can rise. For example, some publishers have noticed increased referral traffic from Reddit as users seek out discussions and human-curated information. Think about where your target audience hangs out online. It could be Reddit, Stack Exchange, LinkedIn groups, Slack communities, industry forums, etc. By participating in those communities (genuinely, not just self-promoting), you can attract traffic in a way that Google’s AI won’t intercept. Strategic partnerships (guest posting, co-marketing, webinars) can also send qualified visitors directly to your site.

• Email and Direct Engagement: Build up your email list and direct outreach. If you publish a great piece of content, share it via email newsletters and encourage sharing. The more you develop a direct line to your audience, the less you rely on algorithms for discovery. Adobe, for instance, forecasted a 32% jump in direct traffic (visits that bypass search engines) in 2025 as consumers increasingly navigate straight to brands or use bookmarks. Encourage this behavior by giving people reasons to come straight to you (exclusive content, a strong community, etc.).

• Paid Search and Paid Social: It may sound ironic in an article about organic traffic, but judicious use of paid channels can fill gaps. Be prepared to bolster your presence via ads for key strategic keywords where you simply can’t afford to lose visibility. If Google is showing an AI answer up top, maybe your ad just below it can still capture attention for a transactional query like “<em>Project Management Software pricing</em>”. Similarly, target interested audiences on LinkedIn or Twitter with content that you might previously have expected organic search to deliver to them. The key is to supplement, not wholly replace organic – you’re buying back some of the visibility that might have been free before.

5. Enhance On-Site Conversion for the Traffic You Do Get. With fewer bites at the apple, it’s crucial to make the most of the clicks you still receive. If your landing pages will be getting less overall traffic, every visitor counts even more. Now is the time to refine your landing page copy and conversion elements to improve the conversion rate. Ensure your messaging is clear and compelling, the call-to-action (CTA) is prominent, and the page addresses common questions or objections a prospect might have. In other words, optimize for quality over quantity of traffic. Also, consider personalizing the experience. If you know a visitor came via an AI assistant or a specific referral, tailor the messaging (e.g., “We see you were interested in how to improve X…”). This can help increase the likelihood that those precious fewer visitors take the next step. The days of throwing up a landing page and counting on heaps of SEO traffic to A/B test minor tweaks are ending; you have to capture value from a leaner flow.

6. Monitor and Embrace Emerging Platforms. The search landscape is still evolving. Today it’s Google’s SGE and chatbots; tomorrow it could be something like an AI-powered personal assistant or a new search paradigm entirely. Keep an eye on how younger audiences search for information (many now use TikTok or Instagram for discovery), and how AI integration in devices might direct traffic. For instance, if Apple or Samsung start deeply integrating AI answers in phones, ensure your app or site is compatible or listed as a source. Similarly, as voice search grows, optimize for that (many voice queries are answered without clicks, but you want to be the answer). Being an early adopter on a new platform can sometimes yield outsized rewards. The key is to be agile and experiment — allocate a portion of your marketing R&D to trying new channels that aren’t Google-dominated.

Conclusion: Thriving in a Post-Click World

The decline of search traffic doesn’t mean the end of online growth; it means the end of business as usual for SEO and content strategy. Think of it like this: the game is moving to a new arena. Google’s SERP used to be the open field where everyone competed for clicks. Now Google is increasingly acting as both player and referee, and AI is changing the rules of the game entirely. But savvy companies can adapt and even turn this to their advantage.

Shrinking organic traffic pushes us to focus on what really matters: building genuine customer interest and trust, rather than just gaming algorithms. It encourages a more holistic approach to marketing — one that balances SEO with brand, community, and product excellence. Yes, your landing pages might get fewer visitors from Google, but those visitors might be more qualified (since simple questions got filtered out by AI). And as generative AI referrals grow, those who do click through from an AI assistant often have higher intent and engagement (early data shows AI-referred visitors spent 8% more time on sites and bounced 23% less often than average). Fewer doesn’t have to mean worse, if you adapt.

In true Paul Graham fashion, one could argue that we're on the cusp of a structural shift in how people find information online. Whenever these shifts happen, opportunities emerge for those who recognize the new pattern early. Your job as a growth or marketing leader is to recognize that the old playbook (relying heavily on Google to fill the top of your funnel) is yielding diminishing returns, and to proactively develop a new playbook. That playbook will likely include a mix of the strategies discussed: stronger branding, content tailored for humans (and AI), diversified channels, and laser-focus on conversion.

The sky isn’t falling — people still need solutions and will seek them out. But the journey from question to answer is being rerouted. Make sure your company is positioned at the new destinations where answers are found, whether that’s an AI-generated snippet, a community forum, or a direct conversation in a webinar. And when those prospects arrive at your landing page, be ready to truly wow them with insight and value (not just SEO keywords).

Bottom line: The era of easy search traffic may be ending, but with clarity and rigor, you can still connect with your audience and grow. It just requires a broader vision of search and a confident pivot in strategy. As the dynamics of search continue to evolve, the companies that thrive will be those that stay curious, experiment boldly, and never lose sight of delivering real value to users — with or without a click.