Both halves of that sentence come from the same dataset, and publishers keep quoting only the half that suits the argument they are making that week.

Growth of two hundred percent is real. So is the base. Referrals from AI chat interfaces remain under one percent of all traffic to publisher sites, against a search channel that has fallen by roughly a third globally and by more in the United States. A channel tripling from nothing is still nothing. Tripling again gets it to three percent, which does not replace a thirty-eight percent decline in the channel that used to carry the business.

Measurement across thousands of publisher sites put the year-over-year decline in Google search referrals at about sixty percent for small publishers, forty-seven percent for medium sites in the ten thousand to hundred thousand daily pageview range, and twenty-two percent for large ones. Globally, search traffic to publishers fell roughly a third in the year to November 2025, with American sites down closer to thirty-eight percent. Discover referrals fell about twenty-one percent.

In February the Post eliminated roughly a third of its workforce, including more than three hundred of about eight hundred newsroom positions. Sports, books, podcasts, foreign, and national desks were gutted. The executive editor told staff the decision was driven in large part by the collapse of organic search traffic, down nearly half in three years.

That explanation deserves more attention than it received, because it is not the usual one.