Data from January 2024 to December 2025 shows generative AI traffic grew by 796% and converted 1.2x more than organic. Here's what this means for businesses.
Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%
Our latest research shows another big hit to organic traffic, thanks to AI Overviews.
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.
State of AI 2026 | The Industry-Defining Report
Explore how AI is shaping the digital economy in 2026, with 80+ pages of data on ad spend, app downloads, web behavior, user demographics, and so much more.
The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
By mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted.
2026 State of AI
Sensor Tower’s State of Web 2026 analyzes web traffic, AI referrals, mobile vs. desktop usage, search, social, and discovery trends.
Pluralistic: Google’s AI pricing plan (21 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:
AI may fatally wound web’s ad model, warns Tim Berners-Lee
Web inventor warns reliance on AI agents threatens multibillion-dollar revenues for Google and Meta
Abundance vs. Scarcity: Who Controls the Internet After AI?
AI is straining the open web, forcing a choice between abundance with redistribution and scarcity built on paywalls, writes Paul Keller.
Meredith Whittaker on Twitter / X
Now that even Goldman, Sequoia, and other major investors are calling it, it's good to remember that the shakiness of the AI market, and the mismatch between capex and ROI, has been clear for a long time to those of us who look closely at the political economy of AI. https://t.co/dLLNAcW5Sn— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) July 30, 2024
What Americans See About AI Online
One month of web browsing data shows most respondents visited a search page with an AI-generated summary, but visits to in-depth content about AI were much rarer.
AI Is A Money Trap
In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that
AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?
The rise of ChatGPT and its rivals is undermining the economic bargain of the internet
Signal's Meredith Whittaker sees AI as another big data grab
The "surveillance business model" is using AI to expand its reach, the privacy expert says.
How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?
In a random sample of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026, one-in-ten show signs of being written or substantially edited by AI.
"The forces that are now shaping AI are the same forces that turned the open internet into monopolistic platforms, converted peer-to-peer participation into precarious labor, and enclosed the digital commons. They are now threatening to capture and enclose thought itself." osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qahd3_v1/
