I have a travel site. HawaiiGuide. It has been running for over two decades. Deep content. Real expertise. The kind of site that should be Google-proof.
Traffic is down 57%.
And it is not just HawaiiGuide. We also run a gardening site that had been growing steadily for years. It is down about 40%. Both sites followed the same trajectory — consistent growth through 2024, then a shift, then an acceleration downward once AI Overviews rolled out broadly.
Here is the part that should concern every independent publisher on the internet: Google Search Console says our ranking position is stronger than it was a year ago.
Read that again. We rank better. We get fewer visits. Those two facts are not supposed to coexist.
Here is what it looks like.
The Decoupling
For twenty years, the equation was simple. Rank higher, get more traffic. Position one gets X% of clicks. Position three gets Y%. The math was predictable enough to build businesses on. Entire industries existed to move you up three positions because the traffic delta was measurable and bankable.
That equation has broken.
What we are seeing across both sites — and what I suspect thousands of publishers are seeing but have not yet connected to a cause — is a fundamental decoupling of rank from traffic. You can sit at position one and watch your clicks evaporate because the answer is being served before the user ever reaches your link.
AI Overviews. Featured snippets on steroids. Google's own synthesis layer now sitting between the query and the click. The user asks "best time to visit Maui," gets a fluent three-paragraph answer assembled from your content and six other sources, and never scrolls down to the blue links.
Your content trained the summary. You get the attribution of a footnote — if that.
The Numbers Nobody Is Publishing
I have talked to other independent publishers. The pattern is consistent. Travel, food, technical reference, local guides — anyone producing the kind of deep, factual content that AI Overviews synthesize well is getting hollowed out.
The sites that are holding up better are the ones producing content that does not compress well into a summary. Opinion. Narrative. Personal experience. Anything where the value is in the reading, not the extracting.
Informational content — the backbone of the independent web — is being consumed without being visited. The information still flows. The traffic does not.
What This Actually Means
This is not a ranking problem. This is not an SEO problem. This is a structural change in how humans consume information.
People did not stop wanting to know about Hawaii. Search volume for travel queries has not cratered. The demand is there. What changed is the delivery mechanism. The user's question gets answered in the search results page itself. The click — the fundamental unit of the open web's economy — is being absorbed by the platform layer.
Google is not sending you traffic anymore. Google is using your content to keep users on Google.
The Twenty-Year Bait and Switch
I want to be careful here because this is where it gets uncomfortable.
Independent publishers spent two decades building content that made Google the dominant information platform. We created the value. Google organized and monetized the distribution. The deal — implicit but understood — was that we provide the content and Google sends us the traffic.
AI Overviews break that deal. The content still gets used. The traffic does not get sent. The value extraction continues. The reciprocity does not.
If you are an independent publisher who built a content-driven business on the assumption that Google would keep sending clicks in exchange for quality content, you are watching your business model dissolve in real time. Not because your content got worse. Not because a competitor outranked you. Because the platform decided to serve your answers without your pages.
What I Am Doing About It
I am not going to pretend I have this figured out. But I will share what I am actively thinking about.
Direct relationships over platform dependency. Email lists. Direct bookmarks. Community. Anything that does not require a search engine to mediate the connection between the reader and the source. The publishers who survive this transition will be the ones who own their audience, not rent it from Google.
Building for the agent layer. If AI is the new discovery mechanism, then the question is not how to rank on Google. It is how to be the source that AI agents trust, cite, and recommend. That is a different optimization target — one based on depth, coherence, and authority rather than keywords and backlinks. I wrote about this in The Attention Layer.
Shifting content strategy toward the uncollapsible. AI Overviews work by compressing informational content into summaries. Content that resists compression — narrative, opinion, personal expertise, the kind of writing where the value is in the voice — cannot be extracted and reassembled. It has to be experienced at the source.
The irony is that the writing I am doing on this site — opinionated, personal, structurally resistant to summarization — may be more durable than the factual travel content I have been building for twenty years.
The Signal
These numbers are canaries. A 57% traffic drop on one site. A 40% drop on another. Both with improved rankings. That is not a blip. It is the data signature of an epoch change.
The click — the atomic unit of the web economy since 1998 — is being absorbed. Not by a competitor. Not by a better product. By the platform that used to distribute it.
If you are an independent publisher and you have not looked at your analytics in six months, look now. And do not just look at rank. Look at click-through rate. That is where the story is hiding.
The Protocol: Rank is no longer a proxy for traffic. The click has been decoupled from the query. If your business depends on Google sending people to your site, your business model has already changed — whether you have noticed yet or not. The question is not how to rank. It is how to matter when the click disappears.
