<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="USA Today AI search pressure" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>The overhaul includes layoffs and a new audience team structure as AI platforms send fewer users back to publisher websites.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="USA Today AI search pressure" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/usa-today-ai-search-pressure-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">USA TODAY is reorganizing its audience team after telling employees that search traffic is under pressure and platforms are increasingly keeping users from clicking through to publishers, according to internal memos. The restructuring coincided with a broader round of layoffs that executives said was necessary to adapt to changing audience behavior and the economics of digital publishing.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Search pressure reshaped the strategy</strong>. Monica Richardson, senior vice president of USA TODAY, tied the reorganization directly to changes in how audiences discover news.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">She wrote that &#8220;growing audience by producing more content isn&#8217;t as effective as it once was,&#8221; adding that &#8220;search traffic is under pressure, and platforms are increasingly keeping user experiences to themselves instead of sending them back to us.&#8221; Richardson said USA TODAY&#8217;s current audience organization &#8220;was built for a different media landscape&#8221; and needed to change.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The memos do not mention Google specifically. But several publishers have seen declining search referrals and shifting audience behavior across search and other digital platforms, especially following the <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-rolls-out-ai-overviews-in-us-with-more-countries-coming-soon-440418">launch of AI Overviews in 2024</a>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>New audience team</strong>. USA TODAY is replacing its existing audience organization with a new Audience and Digital Production Team focused on three areas:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Central Production Desk</strong> to coordinate daily content production and publishing workflows.</li>



<li><strong>Content Pillars Audience Desk</strong> to grow audiences around the company&#8217;s core coverage areas.</li>



<li><strong>Strategic Platforms Desk</strong> to build off-platform audiences and manage platform relationships.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">USA TODAY plans to hire a new executive editor of Audience and Digital Production, along with several audience positions, with the goal of having the team fully operational within six to eight weeks, Richardson also said.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Layoffs accompany broader changes</strong>. In a separate memo, Michael A. Anastasi, senior vice president of Local News, said the company had spent two days saying goodbye to colleagues whose positions were eliminated.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>The layoffs were part of an effort to align USA TODAY Co.&#8217;s cost structure with today&#8217;s business realities as publishers face rapid changes in audience behavior, technology, advertising, and revenue models, he said.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What they&#8217;re saying. </strong>SEO and AI search consultant Glenn Gabe <a href="https://x.com/glenngabe/status/2095852227239821649" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> the memo suggests USA TODAY&#8217;s search challenges extend beyond the impact of AI-generated search experiences:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>&#8220;&#8216;Search traffic is under pressure&#8230;&#8217; Or&#8230; you&#8217;ve been impacted by algorithm updates over time and your search visibility has tanked. USA Today can address this and recover btw. This is not just about AI Overviews eating clicks&#8230; This is a visibility drop too.&#8221;</li>
</ul>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care. </strong>USA TODAY is one of the largest publishers to explicitly cite search traffic pressure as a reason for reorganizing its audience strategy. Expect more publishers to reshape their audience and distribution strategies as search becomes a less reliable source of traffic.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper. <a href="https://searchengineland.com/conde-nast-search-single-digit-traffic-477358">Condé Nast expects search to become a single-digit of its traffic</a></em></strong>
</blockquote>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>The memos.</strong> New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin shared the USA TODAY memos from <a href="https://x.com/BenMullin/status/2095614508764914062" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anasazi</a> and <a href="https://x.com/BenMullin/status/2095468660567482480">Richardson</a>, on X.</p>


USA TODAY is reorganizing its audience team after telling employees that search traffic is under pressure and platforms are increasingly keeping users from clicking through to publishers, according to internal memos. The restructuring coincided with a broader round of layoffs that executives said was necessary to adapt to changing audience behavior and the economics of digital publishing.
Search pressure reshaped the strategy. Monica Richardson, senior vice president of USA TODAY, tied the reorganization directly to changes in how audiences discover news.
She wrote that “growing audience by producing more content isn’t as effective as it once was,” adding that “search traffic is under pressure, and platforms are increasingly keeping user experiences to themselves instead of sending them back to us.” Richardson said USA TODAY’s current audience organization “was built for a different media landscape” and needed to change.
The memos do not mention Google specifically. But several publishers have seen declining search referrals and shifting audience behavior across search and other digital platforms, especially following the launch of AI Overviews in 2024.
New audience team. USA TODAY is replacing its existing audience organization with a new Audience and Digital Production Team focused on three areas:
Central Production Desk to coordinate daily content production and publishing workflows.
Content Pillars Audience Desk to grow audiences around the company’s core coverage areas.
Strategic Platforms Desk to build off-platform audiences and manage platform relationships.
USA TODAY plans to hire a new executive editor of Audience and Digital Production, along with several audience positions, with the goal of having the team fully operational within six to eight weeks, Richardson also said.
Layoffs accompany broader changes. In a separate memo, Michael A. Anastasi, senior vice president of Local News, said the company had spent two days saying goodbye to colleagues whose positions were eliminated.
The layoffs were part of an effort to align USA TODAY Co.’s cost structure with today’s business realities as publishers face rapid changes in audience behavior, technology, advertising, and revenue models, he said.
What they’re saying. SEO and AI search consultant Glenn Gabe said the memo suggests USA TODAY’s search challenges extend beyond the impact of AI-generated search experiences:
“‘Search traffic is under pressure…’ Or… you’ve been impacted by algorithm updates over time and your search visibility has tanked. USA Today can address this and recover btw. This is not just about AI Overviews eating clicks… This is a visibility drop too.”
Why we care. USA TODAY is one of the largest publishers to explicitly cite search traffic pressure as a reason for reorganizing its audience strategy. Expect more publishers to reshape their audience and distribution strategies as search becomes a less reliable source of traffic.
Dig deeper. Condé Nast expects search to become a single-digit of its traffic




The memos. New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin shared the USA TODAY memos from Anasazi and Richardson, on X.

The overhaul includes layoffs and a new audience team structure as AI platforms send fewer users back to publisher websites.

USA TODAY overhauls audience strategy, citing search pressure

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="The biggest winners and losers in U.S. website traffic over the past year" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>ChatGPT surged 48% while Bing fell 50% in U.S. traffic. See which sites gained, which lost, and what the latest data means for SEO.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="The biggest winners and losers in U.S. website traffic over the past year" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-U.S.-website-traffic-over-the-past-year-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/how-to-use-google-analytics-4">Google Analytics 4 </a>(GA4) became mandatory on July 1, 2023, when standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new data. Less than a year later, on May 14, 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews to U.S. users.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The timing matters: The industry lost a clean, comparable measurement baseline just as search traffic patterns started to shift. So, over the past 12 months, who gained website traffic in the U.S., and who lost it? </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The Semrush Traffic Analytics tool tracks the most visited websites in the U.S. and updates the list monthly, making it one of the few sources that can answer that question with real numbers rather than vibes.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I pulled the data as of July 2026 and compared it against the same period a year earlier. What I found confirms some of what you&#8217;d expect and contradicts the rest.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-giants-didn-t-move-their-traffic-did" class="wp-block-heading">The giants didn&#8217;t move. Their traffic did.</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The top of the list looks almost identical to how it looked a year ago. </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Google still ranks first in the U.S., with 25.3 billion monthly visits. </li>



<li>YouTube is still second, at 10.3 billion. </li>



<li>Reddit is still third, at 2.61 billion. </li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If you only glanced at these rankings, you&#8217;d conclude that nothing had changed. You&#8217;d be wrong. Google&#8217;s traffic is up 10.72% year over year. YouTube is up a startling 36.6% compared to a year ago.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Between them, Google and YouTube now account for a huge share of all attention at the top of the web, and the top three sites alone generate 54.3% of the top 10&#8217;s traffic. Concentration at the very top hasn&#8217;t loosened. If anything, it&#8217;s tightened.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That stability is itself the headline. Total visits across the top 150 U.S. sites only rose 6.1% year over year, and the top 10 still account for 68.6% of all of it, almost unchanged from 68.8% a year ago.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The web isn&#8217;t getting less concentrated as AI changes search. It&#8217;s getting more so, just with a couple of new names inside the circle.</p>


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<h2 id="h-the-clearest-winner-chatgpt" class="wp-block-heading">The clearest winner: ChatGPT</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If you want one number that captures how much the search landscape has shifted, it&#8217;s this one: ChatGPT.com is up 48.38% year over year, now ranking ninth among all U.S. websites with 1.09 billion monthly visits, ahead of DuckDuckGo and Bing.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A year ago, that sentence would&#8217;ve read differently. Today, an AI chatbot outranks a couple of search engines that have been around since 2008 and 2009.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">TikTok, by comparison, ranks 14th with 573.6 million visits and a much more modest 1.63% year-over-year gain. So, it&#8217;s not that &#8220;new platforms&#8221; are winning across the board — it&#8217;s specifically that generative AI usage has moved from novelty to habit fast enough to show up as one of the single-biggest traffic gains anywhere in the top 20.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A few other winners are worth flagging because they aren&#8217;t AI chatbots:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>LinkedIn</strong> climbed from 21st to 19th place, with visits up 15.48% year over year to 473.7 million — enough to push it into the top 20 for the first time in this data set.</li>



<li><strong>USPS.com</strong> is up 12.04% year over year, a reminder that utility and habit still drive traffic even in an AI-saturated news cycle.</li>



<li><strong>Twitch</strong> climbed five spots to 25th after a 25.6% jump in visits.</li>



<li><strong>Comix.to</strong>, further down the list, posted the single-largest percentage gain of any site I looked at, jumping 14 places (70th to 56th) on a 37.3% increase in visits.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-priorities-win-organic-traffic-454482">3 SEO priorities to win organic traffic in 2027</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-the-losers-are-more-interesting-than-the-winners" class="wp-block-heading">The losers are more interesting than the winners</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Here&#8217;s what surprised me: The steepest year-over-year decline in the entire top 20 doesn&#8217;t belong to a struggling news site or a fading social network. It belongs to Bing, which is down 50.43% year over year.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Microsoft has spent three years and enormous sums bolting Copilot onto Bing to convert AI hype into search share, and the traffic data suggests that bet still hasn&#8217;t paid off the way Redmond hoped.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Bing&#8217;s standalone search share has been essentially flat against Google for years, and this year&#8217;s numbers look like a continuation of that pattern rather than a break from it.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Temu is the other big decliner, down 28.55% year over year. That one has a clear, well-documented cause.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The closure of the &#8220;de minimis&#8221; tariff exemption on low-value Chinese imports in mid-2025 gutted the pricing advantage that built Temu&#8217;s U.S. business in the first place, and reporting at the time showed Temu&#8217;s U.S. ad spend and app rankings collapsing in tandem with the policy change.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">This wasn&#8217;t an SEO story or an AI story. It was a trade policy story that happened to show up in traffic data.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The rest of the losers list is a mix of the predictable and the genuinely surprising:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Amazon, down 15.31% year over year — a notable decline for a site whose traffic is usually treated as a bellwether for ecommerce health.</li>



<li>Yahoo, down 13.82%.</li>



<li>DuckDuckGo, down 15.83%, which is worth sitting with given that it&#8217;s a search engine, not a social network or a retailer.</li>



<li>ESPN fell from 19th to 24th (visits down 16.0% to 366.0 million).</li>



<li>NBCNews.com dropped 35 spots to 145th, with visits down 20.2%.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">None of these losses are identical in cause. But taken together, they say something the top-line &#8220;Google and YouTube are still winning&#8221; narrative doesn&#8217;t: Traffic is being redistributed, unevenly and for different reasons, well below the top three positions everyone already watches.</p>



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<h2 id="h-here-s-the-part-that-should-worry-seos" class="wp-block-heading">Here&#8217;s the part that should worry SEOs</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Jes Scholz wrote a piece back in February called &#8220;<a href="https://searchengineland.com/why-ga4-alone-cant-measure-the-real-impact-of-ai-seo-468387">Why GA4 alone can&#8217;t measure the real impact of AI SEO</a>,&#8221; arguing that relying on GA4 by itself leaves AI SEO measurement lost in what she called the Bermuda Triangle of analytics.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I didn&#8217;t fully appreciate how right she was until I looked at a GA4 account that I hadn&#8217;t checked out in a year.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For context, I provide pro bono consulting to a niche publishing website. I recently pulled their GA4 traffic acquisition report for Jan. 1 through Aug. 26, 2026, and compared it to the same period in 2025.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">On the surface, it looks like great news: sessions up over 105%, engaged sessions up almost 111%, key events up about 80.5%. If you stopped there, you&#8217;d tell this publisher they&#8217;re winning.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Keep reading the same report, though, and direct traffic is up more than 157% and now accounts for over 78% of their total traffic, up from about 62.5% a year earlier. That means GA4 can&#8217;t identify where almost four out of every five visitors came from — and that share is growing every month.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;Direct&#8221; isn&#8217;t a traffic source. It&#8217;s the label GA4 slaps on everything it can&#8217;t attribute, and an increasing amount of that unattributed traffic is almost certainly arriving via links generated inside AI chat interfaces, which routinely get stripped of the referrer data that GA4 depends on.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So, is this niche publisher winning? It depends on whether you&#8217;re looking backward or forward.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The historical metrics look fantastic. However, the attribution underneath them is getting worse every month, which means the next set of decisions this publisher makes about content and channel investment will be based on data that&#8217;s actively losing its ability to explain itself.</p>



<h2 id="h-two-rules-of-italian-driving" class="wp-block-heading">Two rules of Italian driving</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There&#8217;s a scene in the 1976 movie “The Gumball Rally” where the Italian racer Franco, played by Raul Julia, climbs into his Ferrari Daytona Spyder before a cross-country race, rips the rearview mirror clean off the windshield, and tosses it over his shoulder.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;And now, my friend, the primo rule of Italian driving,&#8221; he says. &#8220;What&#8217;s-a behind me is not important.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That&#8217;s what I&#8217;d recommend doing with most of GA4&#8217;s 19 default channels at this point — including the AI Assistant channel, which tracks visits arriving from ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot, or Grok. (It excludes Google&#8217;s own AI Overviews and AI Mode entirely.)</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It&#8217;s not a huge loss. According to GA4, only 0.47% of traffic to this same niche publisher&#8217;s site has come through the native AI Assistant channel since GA4 added it on May 13, 2026. Whatever AI-driven traffic they&#8217;re getting isn&#8217;t showing up where it&#8217;s supposed to.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">This prompted me to create the second rule of Italian driving: Pay more attention to the audience intelligence and market research tools that can see the treacherous road ahead instead of the one behind you.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That list, for SEOs trying to navigate this difficult challenge, includes:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Semrush&#8217;s website traffic tracker</strong>, which estimates monthly traffic for any domain or URL and shows where competitor traffic originates, which pages capture it, and which keywords and channels drive growth.</li>



<li><strong>SparkToro&#8217;s audience research software</strong>, which surfaces what a target audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows — particularly useful for mapping channel affinities, subreddits, and podcasts that GA4 will never show you.</li>



<li><strong>GWI (Global Web Index)</strong>, which runs pre-profiled consumer panels across more than 50 markets and excels at granular psychographic and behavioral segmentation.</li>



<li><strong>YouGov Profiles</strong>, for continuous survey data on brand perception, shopping habits, and demographics.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEOs should also just start surveying their own customers directly — combining traditional survey tools that capture direct feedback with analytics tools that decode implicit intent gives you both the exact phrases customers use and the content gaps they reveal.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">On the survey side, they should consider using:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>SurveyMonkey</strong> for deep segment research, with AI-driven synthesis that groups open-ended responses into themes you can turn directly into content categories.</li>



<li><strong>Typeform</strong> for response rates, thanks to a conversational interface that works well embedded in high-traffic landing pages or posts.</li>



<li><strong>Google Forms</strong> for quick, zero-budget pulse checks that flow straight into a spreadsheet.</li>



<li><strong>Qualtrics</strong> for enterprise-grade logic flows and demographic segmentation.</li>
</ul>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/ai-seo/overview?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0102ai&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
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<h2 id="h-measure-what-ga4-can-t-see" class="wp-block-heading">Measure what GA4 can&#8217;t see</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It might seem strange to end an article about website traffic winners and losers with a list of survey tools. But that&#8217;s the point.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google and YouTube are still winning, ChatGPT is gaining ground, Bing and DuckDuckGo are losing for different reasons, and underneath all of it, the tool most SEOs still lean on hardest — GA4 — is becoming less able to tell you which channel any individual visitor belongs to.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So, to be one of next year&#8217;s winners instead of next year&#8217;s cautionary tale, adopt both rules of Italian driving: Pay less attention to what GA4&#8217;s default channels tell you about where your traffic came from, and pay a lot more attention to the audience intelligence and market research tools built to see what GA4 can&#8217;t.</p>

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) became mandatory on July 1, 2023, when standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new data. Less than a year later, on May 14, 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews to U.S. users.
The timing matters: The industry lost a clean, comparable measurement baseline just as search traffic patterns started to shift. So, over the past 12 months, who gained website traffic in the U.S., and who lost it? 
The Semrush Traffic Analytics tool tracks the most visited websites in the U.S. and updates the list monthly, making it one of the few sources that can answer that question with real numbers rather than vibes.
I pulled the data as of July 2026 and compared it against the same period a year earlier. What I found confirms some of what you’d expect and contradicts the rest.
The giants didn’t move. Their traffic did.
The top of the list looks almost identical to how it looked a year ago. 
Google still ranks first in the U.S., with 25.3 billion monthly visits. 
YouTube is still second, at 10.3 billion. 
Reddit is still third, at 2.61 billion. 
If you only glanced at these rankings, you’d conclude that nothing had changed. You’d be wrong. Google’s traffic is up 10.72% year over year. YouTube is up a startling 36.6% compared to a year ago.
Between them, Google and YouTube now account for a huge share of all attention at the top of the web, and the top three sites alone generate 54.3% of the top 10’s traffic. Concentration at the very top hasn’t loosened. If anything, it’s tightened.
That stability is itself the headline. Total visits across the top 150 U.S. sites only rose 6.1% year over year, and the top 10 still account for 68.6% of all of it, almost unchanged from 68.8% a year ago.
The web isn’t getting less concentrated as AI changes search. It’s getting more so, just with a couple of new names inside the circle.
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The clearest winner: ChatGPT
If you want one number that captures how much the search landscape has shifted, it’s this one: ChatGPT.com is up 48.38% year over year, now ranking ninth among all U.S. websites with 1.09 billion monthly visits, ahead of DuckDuckGo and Bing.
A year ago, that sentence would’ve read differently. Today, an AI chatbot outranks a couple of search engines that have been around since 2008 and 2009.
TikTok, by comparison, ranks 14th with 573.6 million visits and a much more modest 1.63% year-over-year gain. So, it’s not that “new platforms” are winning across the board — it’s specifically that generative AI usage has moved from novelty to habit fast enough to show up as one of the single-biggest traffic gains anywhere in the top 20.
A few other winners are worth flagging because they aren’t AI chatbots:
LinkedIn climbed from 21st to 19th place, with visits up 15.48% year over year to 473.7 million — enough to push it into the top 20 for the first time in this data set.
USPS.com is up 12.04% year over year, a reminder that utility and habit still drive traffic even in an AI-saturated news cycle.
Twitch climbed five spots to 25th after a 25.6% jump in visits.
Comix.to, further down the list, posted the single-largest percentage gain of any site I looked at, jumping 14 places (70th to 56th) on a 37.3% increase in visits.
Dig deeper: 3 SEO priorities to win organic traffic in 2027



The losers are more interesting than the winners
Here’s what surprised me: The steepest year-over-year decline in the entire top 20 doesn’t belong to a struggling news site or a fading social network. It belongs to Bing, which is down 50.43% year over year.
Microsoft has spent three years and enormous sums bolting Copilot onto Bing to convert AI hype into search share, and the traffic data suggests that bet still hasn’t paid off the way Redmond hoped.
Bing’s standalone search share has been essentially flat against Google for years, and this year’s numbers look like a continuation of that pattern rather than a break from it.
Temu is the other big decliner, down 28.55% year over year. That one has a clear, well-documented cause.
The closure of the “de minimis” tariff exemption on low-value Chinese imports in mid-2025 gutted the pricing advantage that built Temu’s U.S. business in the first place, and reporting at the time showed Temu’s U.S. ad spend and app rankings collapsing in tandem with the policy change.
This wasn’t an SEO story or an AI story. It was a trade policy story that happened to show up in traffic data.
The rest of the losers list is a mix of the predictable and the genuinely surprising:
Amazon, down 15.31% year over year — a notable decline for a site whose traffic is usually treated as a bellwether for ecommerce health.
Yahoo, down 13.82%.
DuckDuckGo, down 15.83%, which is worth sitting with given that it’s a search engine, not a social network or a retailer.
ESPN fell from 19th to 24th (visits down 16.0% to 366.0 million).
NBCNews.com dropped 35 spots to 145th, with visits down 20.2%.
None of these losses are identical in cause. But taken together, they say something the top-line “Google and YouTube are still winning” narrative doesn’t: Traffic is being redistributed, unevenly and for different reasons, well below the top three positions everyone already watches.
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Here’s the part that should worry SEOs
Jes Scholz wrote a piece back in February called “Why GA4 alone can’t measure the real impact of AI SEO,” arguing that relying on GA4 by itself leaves AI SEO measurement lost in what she called the Bermuda Triangle of analytics.
I didn’t fully appreciate how right she was until I looked at a GA4 account that I hadn’t checked out in a year.
For context, I provide pro bono consulting to a niche publishing website. I recently pulled their GA4 traffic acquisition report for Jan. 1 through Aug. 26, 2026, and compared it to the same period in 2025.
On the surface, it looks like great news: sessions up over 105%, engaged sessions up almost 111%, key events up about 80.5%. If you stopped there, you’d tell this publisher they’re winning.
Keep reading the same report, though, and direct traffic is up more than 157% and now accounts for over 78% of their total traffic, up from about 62.5% a year earlier. That means GA4 can’t identify where almost four out of every five visitors came from — and that share is growing every month.
“Direct” isn’t a traffic source. It’s the label GA4 slaps on everything it can’t attribute, and an increasing amount of that unattributed traffic is almost certainly arriving via links generated inside AI chat interfaces, which routinely get stripped of the referrer data that GA4 depends on.
So, is this niche publisher winning? It depends on whether you’re looking backward or forward.
The historical metrics look fantastic. However, the attribution underneath them is getting worse every month, which means the next set of decisions this publisher makes about content and channel investment will be based on data that’s actively losing its ability to explain itself.
Two rules of Italian driving
There’s a scene in the 1976 movie “The Gumball Rally” where the Italian racer Franco, played by Raul Julia, climbs into his Ferrari Daytona Spyder before a cross-country race, rips the rearview mirror clean off the windshield, and tosses it over his shoulder.
“And now, my friend, the primo rule of Italian driving,” he says. “What’s-a behind me is not important.”
That’s what I’d recommend doing with most of GA4’s 19 default channels at this point — including the AI Assistant channel, which tracks visits arriving from ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot, or Grok. (It excludes Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode entirely.)
It’s not a huge loss. According to GA4, only 0.47% of traffic to this same niche publisher’s site has come through the native AI Assistant channel since GA4 added it on May 13, 2026. Whatever AI-driven traffic they’re getting isn’t showing up where it’s supposed to.
This prompted me to create the second rule of Italian driving: Pay more attention to the audience intelligence and market research tools that can see the treacherous road ahead instead of the one behind you.
That list, for SEOs trying to navigate this difficult challenge, includes:
Semrush’s website traffic tracker, which estimates monthly traffic for any domain or URL and shows where competitor traffic originates, which pages capture it, and which keywords and channels drive growth.
SparkToro’s audience research software, which surfaces what a target audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows — particularly useful for mapping channel affinities, subreddits, and podcasts that GA4 will never show you.
GWI (Global Web Index), which runs pre-profiled consumer panels across more than 50 markets and excels at granular psychographic and behavioral segmentation.
YouGov Profiles, for continuous survey data on brand perception, shopping habits, and demographics.
SEOs should also just start surveying their own customers directly — combining traditional survey tools that capture direct feedback with analytics tools that decode implicit intent gives you both the exact phrases customers use and the content gaps they reveal.
On the survey side, they should consider using:
SurveyMonkey for deep segment research, with AI-driven synthesis that groups open-ended responses into themes you can turn directly into content categories.
Typeform for response rates, thanks to a conversational interface that works well embedded in high-traffic landing pages or posts.
Google Forms for quick, zero-budget pulse checks that flow straight into a spreadsheet.
Qualtrics for enterprise-grade logic flows and demographic segmentation.
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Measure what GA4 can’t see
It might seem strange to end an article about website traffic winners and losers with a list of survey tools. But that’s the point.
Google and YouTube are still winning, ChatGPT is gaining ground, Bing and DuckDuckGo are losing for different reasons, and underneath all of it, the tool most SEOs still lean on hardest — GA4 — is becoming less able to tell you which channel any individual visitor belongs to.
So, to be one of next year’s winners instead of next year’s cautionary tale, adopt both rules of Italian driving: Pay less attention to what GA4’s default channels tell you about where your traffic came from, and pay a lot more attention to the audience intelligence and market research tools built to see what GA4 can’t.

ChatGPT surged 48% while Bing fell 50% in U.S. traffic. See which sites gained, which lost, and what the latest data means for SEO.

The big winners and losers in U.S. website traffic over the past year

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="SEO and PPC are sitting on each other’s best insights" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>The keyword that’s too expensive for PPC could be your next SEO priority. The page that ranks first could tell you where to cut paid spend. 

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="SEO and PPC are sitting on each other’s best insights" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/SEO-and-PPC-are-sitting-on-each-others-best-insights-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Having both <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo">SEO</a> and <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-paid-search">PPC</a> doesn’t mean you have a search strategy. It means you have two channel strategies. That’s very different, and the gap between them is where budget gets wasted and opportunities get missed.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In many businesses, the SEO team and the PPC team operate separately. One focuses on organic visibility, while the other focuses on managing bids and budget. Both are hitting their own targets and reporting on their own metrics, but nobody is looking at the bigger picture. That’s where the problems start.</p>



<h2 id="h-why-the-silos-exist-in-the-first-place" class="wp-block-heading">Why the silos exist in the first place</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO and PPC genuinely are different jobs. The skills, the tools, and the way success is measured are different. In many agencies and businesses, they sit in separate teams, sometimes with separate budget holders or even separate agencies managing each one. That makes sense up to a point. The problem is when that separation becomes the default, and<a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-silo-breaks-cross-channel-execution-starts-467508"> nobody ever looks across both channels at once</a>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Part of the issue is how teams are measured. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">An SEO team gets judged on rankings and organic traffic. A PPC team gets judged on CPC, conversion rate, and return on ad spend. Neither is set up to care about what the other is doing, and unless someone has visibility across both, the gaps just stay there.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Sometimes the issue is simpler than that. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Teams don’t always know enough about the other channel to ask the right questions. Other times, there’s a reluctance to share data in case it leads to budget being redirected away from their channel. Both are understandable, but both come at a cost to the business.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-vs-ppc-debate-finally-over-482366">Why the SEO vs. PPC debate is finally over</a></em></strong>


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<h2 id="h-what-the-disconnect-actually-costs" class="wp-block-heading">What the disconnect actually costs</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The most obvious waste is paying for clicks on terms you already rank for organically. If a page is sitting in position one, there’s a reasonable argument for not bidding on that keyword at all. But if the PPC team has no visibility into where the site ranks organically, that spend just keeps going.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The less obvious cost is the missed opportunity when paid performance shifts. If CPCs are rising on certain terms and the return is falling, that’s a signal worth acting on. Those terms are becoming more expensive to win through paid, making them stronger candidates for organic investment, whether that’s creating new content or improving pages that are already close to ranking. That thinking requires looking across both channels.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The impact runs in both directions. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When paid data shows which keywords convert, that intelligence should be feeding directly into organic content priorities. When organic data shows which terms a site already ranks strongly for, that should inform where paid budget gets focused and where it gets pulled back. Without that flow of information between teams, both channels are making decisions based on an incomplete picture.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There’s also a brand consistency issue that rarely gets discussed. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When SEO and PPC operate separately, they can end up sending different messages to the same audience. The organic result might lead to an informational page, while the paid ad drives to a promotional landing page for the same query. From the user’s perspective, that inconsistency erodes trust and reduces the likelihood of converting, regardless of which channel brought them in.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When SEO and PPC teams share data and make decisions together, businesses make better use of their marketing budget. Paid spend can be focused on keywords where organic visibility is limited, while strong organic rankings reduce reliance on paid ads for established terms. The result is a more efficient overall search strategy, with the two channels working together rather than running in parallel.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/new-search-journey-seo-ppc-484630">The new search journey changes how SEO and PPC should work</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-what-good-collaboration-looks-like-in-practice" class="wp-block-heading">What good collaboration looks like in practice</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The good news is that none of this requires a major restructure. Three practical changes make the biggest difference.</p>



<h3 id="h-start-with-shared-keyword-research" class="wp-block-heading">Start with shared keyword research</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Keyword research should never be a channel-specific task. Both teams need to be working from the same list from the start.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO takes a long-term view: what people are searching for over time and what informational content is needed. PPC brings the commercial validation, what’s actually converting, and what the demand looks like right now. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When both teams are looking at the same data, they stop pulling in different directions and start making decisions together.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-ppc-alignment-483407">SEO and PPC alignment starts with your org chart</a></em></strong>



<h3 id="h-avoid-duplicate-landing-pages" class="wp-block-heading">Avoid duplicate landing pages</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One of the most common problems I see is duplicate landing pages, and it almost always comes down to one team not knowing what the other has already built. The PPC team needs a page for a campaign. They request one, and nobody checks whether SEO already has a page targeting the same thing. You end up with two pages going after the same intent, splitting authority, and confusing Google about which one to rank.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I’ve seen this play out where a new page goes live for a paid campaign and, a few weeks later, the SEO team spots it in Google Search Console without knowing where it came from. They spend time working out whether it’s cannibalizing an existing page, whether a canonical tag is needed, or whether a noindex tag would be more appropriate to keep the page out of organic search entirely. That’s time spent fixing a problem that a five-minute conversation could’ve prevented.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Before any new landing page gets built for a paid campaign, someone should check what already exists. More often than not, improving a page that’s already there gets better results for both channels than starting from scratch.</p>



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<h3 id="h-hold-joint-client-calls" class="wp-block-heading">Hold joint client calls</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Getting both teams on the same monthly call sounds simple, but it makes a significant difference. Everyone hears the same objectives, commercial priorities, and campaign updates at the same time.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If the PPC team is planning a new landing page or shifting keyword priorities, the SEO team knows in advance. That’s when you can actually prevent problems rather than just fix them.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It also changes the dynamic with the client. Instead of two teams presenting their results separately, everyone looks at the account as a whole. Clients notice that. It builds confidence that they’re getting one joined-up strategy rather than two separate teams doing their own thing.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-data-both-teams-should-be-sharing" class="wp-block-heading">The data both teams should be sharing</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/end-seo-ppc-silos-unified-search-strategy-ai-era-463006">PPC search term reports show which queries are driving paid conversions</a>, which are expensive without converting, and where CPCs are trending. That information is directly useful for organic keyword prioritization, content planning, and identifying gaps where SEO isn’t yet competing.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In the other direction, organic ranking data shows where a site is already visible without paying. If a page ranks in position one for a term, that’s a signal to reduce or pause ad spend on that keyword and redirect budget elsewhere. If pages are ranking between positions four and 10, a targeted paid push could increase total visibility while organic continues to improve.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO content research is also a valuable source of negative keywords for paid campaigns. If the SEO team knows which informational queries are driving organic traffic that doesn’t convert, that list should feed directly into PPC negative keyword exclusions. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Paying for clicks on queries that consistently fail to convert is a straightforward waste of budget, and the SEO team often has the data to prevent it. This is one of the simplest and most overlooked ways the two channels can save the business money without changing anything else.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Both teams should also be reporting on the same outcomes. Revenue, leads, and conversions matter more than channel-specific metrics. When both teams are measuring the same commercial results, deciding how to allocate effort and budget becomes much more straightforward.</p>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/analytics/traffic/paid-search?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0102ppc&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
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<h2 id="h-the-fix-is-simpler-than-you-think" class="wp-block-heading">The fix is simpler than you think</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The gap between SEO and PPC isn’t a technical problem. It’s a communication problem. And communication problems are the easiest ones to fix, if someone decides to.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO and PPC don’t need to become one team. They need to share the data that helps each make better decisions. When paid insights inform organic priorities and organic data informs paid spend, both channels can work toward a more efficient search strategy instead of operating in parallel.</p>

Having both SEO and PPC doesn’t mean you have a search strategy. It means you have two channel strategies. That’s very different, and the gap between them is where budget gets wasted and opportunities get missed.
In many businesses, the SEO team and the PPC team operate separately. One focuses on organic visibility, while the other focuses on managing bids and budget. Both are hitting their own targets and reporting on their own metrics, but nobody is looking at the bigger picture. That’s where the problems start.
Why the silos exist in the first place
SEO and PPC genuinely are different jobs. The skills, the tools, and the way success is measured are different. In many agencies and businesses, they sit in separate teams, sometimes with separate budget holders or even separate agencies managing each one. That makes sense up to a point. The problem is when that separation becomes the default, and nobody ever looks across both channels at once.
Part of the issue is how teams are measured. 
An SEO team gets judged on rankings and organic traffic. A PPC team gets judged on CPC, conversion rate, and return on ad spend. Neither is set up to care about what the other is doing, and unless someone has visibility across both, the gaps just stay there.
Sometimes the issue is simpler than that. 
Teams don’t always know enough about the other channel to ask the right questions. Other times, there’s a reluctance to share data in case it leads to budget being redirected away from their channel. Both are understandable, but both come at a cost to the business.
Dig deeper: Why the SEO vs. PPC debate is finally over



  
your competitors win.
      
Analyze your competitors
    
What the disconnect actually costs
The most obvious waste is paying for clicks on terms you already rank for organically. If a page is sitting in position one, there’s a reasonable argument for not bidding on that keyword at all. But if the PPC team has no visibility into where the site ranks organically, that spend just keeps going.
The less obvious cost is the missed opportunity when paid performance shifts. If CPCs are rising on certain terms and the return is falling, that’s a signal worth acting on. Those terms are becoming more expensive to win through paid, making them stronger candidates for organic investment, whether that’s creating new content or improving pages that are already close to ranking. That thinking requires looking across both channels.
The impact runs in both directions. 
When paid data shows which keywords convert, that intelligence should be feeding directly into organic content priorities. When organic data shows which terms a site already ranks strongly for, that should inform where paid budget gets focused and where it gets pulled back. Without that flow of information between teams, both channels are making decisions based on an incomplete picture.
There’s also a brand consistency issue that rarely gets discussed. 
When SEO and PPC operate separately, they can end up sending different messages to the same audience. The organic result might lead to an informational page, while the paid ad drives to a promotional landing page for the same query. From the user’s perspective, that inconsistency erodes trust and reduces the likelihood of converting, regardless of which channel brought them in.
When SEO and PPC teams share data and make decisions together, businesses make better use of their marketing budget. Paid spend can be focused on keywords where organic visibility is limited, while strong organic rankings reduce reliance on paid ads for established terms. The result is a more efficient overall search strategy, with the two channels working together rather than running in parallel.
Dig deeper: The new search journey changes how SEO and PPC should work



What good collaboration looks like in practice
The good news is that none of this requires a major restructure. Three practical changes make the biggest difference.
Start with shared keyword research
Keyword research should never be a channel-specific task. Both teams need to be working from the same list from the start. 
SEO takes a long-term view: what people are searching for over time and what informational content is needed. PPC brings the commercial validation, what’s actually converting, and what the demand looks like right now. 
When both teams are looking at the same data, they stop pulling in different directions and start making decisions together.
Dig deeper: SEO and PPC alignment starts with your org chart



Avoid duplicate landing pages
One of the most common problems I see is duplicate landing pages, and it almost always comes down to one team not knowing what the other has already built. The PPC team needs a page for a campaign. They request one, and nobody checks whether SEO already has a page targeting the same thing. You end up with two pages going after the same intent, splitting authority, and confusing Google about which one to rank.
I’ve seen this play out where a new page goes live for a paid campaign and, a few weeks later, the SEO team spots it in Google Search Console without knowing where it came from. They spend time working out whether it’s cannibalizing an existing page, whether a canonical tag is needed, or whether a noindex tag would be more appropriate to keep the page out of organic search entirely. That’s time spent fixing a problem that a five-minute conversation could’ve prevented.
Before any new landing page gets built for a paid campaign, someone should check what already exists. More often than not, improving a page that’s already there gets better results for both channels than starting from scratch.
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
Hold joint client calls
Getting both teams on the same monthly call sounds simple, but it makes a significant difference. Everyone hears the same objectives, commercial priorities, and campaign updates at the same time. 
If the PPC team is planning a new landing page or shifting keyword priorities, the SEO team knows in advance. That’s when you can actually prevent problems rather than just fix them.
It also changes the dynamic with the client. Instead of two teams presenting their results separately, everyone looks at the account as a whole. Clients notice that. It builds confidence that they’re getting one joined-up strategy rather than two separate teams doing their own thing.
The data both teams should be sharing
PPC search term reports show which queries are driving paid conversions, which are expensive without converting, and where CPCs are trending. That information is directly useful for organic keyword prioritization, content planning, and identifying gaps where SEO isn’t yet competing.
In the other direction, organic ranking data shows where a site is already visible without paying. If a page ranks in position one for a term, that’s a signal to reduce or pause ad spend on that keyword and redirect budget elsewhere. If pages are ranking between positions four and 10, a targeted paid push could increase total visibility while organic continues to improve.
SEO content research is also a valuable source of negative keywords for paid campaigns. If the SEO team knows which informational queries are driving organic traffic that doesn’t convert, that list should feed directly into PPC negative keyword exclusions. 
Paying for clicks on queries that consistently fail to convert is a straightforward waste of budget, and the SEO team often has the data to prevent it. This is one of the simplest and most overlooked ways the two channels can save the business money without changing anything else.
Both teams should also be reporting on the same outcomes. Revenue, leads, and conversions matter more than channel-specific metrics. When both teams are measuring the same commercial results, deciding how to allocate effort and budget becomes much more straightforward.
a customer you lose.
      
See who’s stealing your traffic
    
The fix is simpler than you think
The gap between SEO and PPC isn’t a technical problem. It’s a communication problem. And communication problems are the easiest ones to fix, if someone decides to.
SEO and PPC don’t need to become one team. They need to share the data that helps each make better decisions. When paid insights inform organic priorities and organic data informs paid spend, both channels can work toward a more efficient search strategy instead of operating in parallel.

The keyword that’s too expensive for PPC could be your next SEO priority. The page that ranks first could tell you where to cut paid spend.

SEO and PPC are sitting on each other’s best insights

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/Limited-Ad-Serving-Why-Google-Ads-suddenly-stop-showing.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Limited Ad Serving- Why Google Ads suddenly stop showing" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/Limited-Ad-Serving-Why-Google-Ads-suddenly-stop-showing.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/Limited-Ad-Serving-Why-Google-Ads-suddenly-stop-showing-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/Limited-Ad-Serving-Why-Google-Ads-suddenly-stop-showing-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/Limited-Ad-Serving-Why-Google-Ads-suddenly-stop-showing-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>Google can limit ad serving without disapproving your ads. Learn what puts accounts at risk, how to spot a limitation, and how to appeal.

Google Ads can limit how often your ads appear without disapproving them or suspending your account. The Limited Ad Serving policy restricts an account’s eligibility to enter certain auctions, potentially reducing impressions and increasing the cost of capturing the remaining traffic.
For advertisers that rely on branded keywords, affiliates, resellers, or third-party lead generation, the impact can be significant — and getting the limitation removed can take months.
What is Limited Ad Serving?
Limited Ad Serving is a status Google applies to an ad account that limits how often ads from that account may serve in auctions in which they’re technically eligible to participate.
Google introduced Limited Ad Serving in 2023 for Search and YouTube campaigns. In 2026, Google refined the policy and expanded it to other Google ad surfaces, including Gmail, the Play Store, and Discover. The broader implementation is rolling out through 2028.
It’s not a suspension, a strike, or a disapproval. Google isn’t even saying that you’ve done anything wrong.
Note: Google has a habit of using similar words to describe different things.
Limited Ad Serving: An account-level limitation that prevents your ads from showing in some auctions. Google doesn’t share its criteria for determining which auctions you can reach.
Eligible (limited) Ads: An ad-level status indicating that a particular ad isn’t allowed to show in specific situations. There’s usually more insight into where your ad can’t serve, which might include specific countries or age groups.
Limited Ads (Google AdSense): A status impacting how publishers using Google AdSense collect, share, and use personalized data.
Here’s an example of an ad-level notification about an ad that is limited.




  
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Case study: $3 million account loses 56% of impressions
We have a client who is an authorized retailer for several large brands. They have written agreements with the brands they represent to use “authorized retailer” logos and the respective brand names on their landing pages and, in some cases, in their ad copy.
With no warning, Google notified us that it was limiting impressions due to the Limited Ad Serving policy. Overnight, impressions plunged.
We appealed the limitation, hoping the contracts we provided would get it lifted quickly. Google almost immediately denied the appeal, and we entered a seven-month-long nightmare.
Our average monthly impressions dropped from 800,000 before the limitation to 350,000 afterward. We only squeezed out that 350,000 by getting much more aggressive with bidding and living with higher CPCs and CPAs in order to capture at least some of the traffic we were losing.




We had countless calls and emails with our team at Google, and they escalated the case to director-level support before we were finally able to get the limitation removed.
The impressions immediately came roaring back, and we quickly got the account back to pre-limitation levels.
Which advertisers are most likely to be limited?
The most common way to trigger Limited Ad Serving is to target company or product names as keywords.
We see the flag most often affect these industries:
Affiliates.
Insurance.
Consumer services (e.g. internet, phone service).
Third-party lead generation.
Travel.
Franchises.
We’ve even seen accounts flagged for targeting competitor keywords in a typical “competitor conquesting” campaign, although this is more likely to happen if you’re in a sensitive vertical.
Google monitors your online reputation, as well as reports submitted directly about your Google Ads. Many direct reports or a high volume of negative online feedback may also trigger a Limited Ad Serving flag (or, in some cases, an Unacceptable Business Practices suspension).
New ad accounts are also more likely to be flagged, but we’ve also seen ad accounts with millions of dollars and years of history be limited.
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How to tell if your ads are limited
Google will display this notification in your ad account:




Google doesn’t promise to send an email notification when your ad account becomes limited, but it usually sends an email that looks like this:




If you click to hide the notification in your account, you may find yourself wondering whether you’re still limited.
The only way to find out for sure is to contact Google support and ask.
How to prevent Limited Ad Serving
Unfortunately, your ability to avoid Limited Ad Serving is quite limited (pun intended) if you’re in an industry that’s likely to be flagged.
The strategies below align with Google’s best practices and our experience.
1. Don’t target other companies’ branded keywords unless you have to
If you’re targeting a competitor and you’re using your own brand name in your ad copy and not theirs, you’ll probably be fine.
But if you’re targeting branded keywords as an affiliate/reseller or third-party lead generation business, you risk becoming limited.
Example: A website comparing the prices of flights targets keywords like “American Airlines” and “Southwest Airlines.”
2. Use your own branding on your landing pages
Even if you’re an authorized reseller, don’t use your partner’s logo as your website logo.
Use your own logo and business name in your header and footer, and if you’re going to use your partner’s logo and business name in the body of the page, make your relationship with them clear so it’s not easy for consumers to mistakenly think they’ve arrived on an “official” website.
Don’t use your partner’s name as part of your domain name.
3. Use your brand name in your Google ads
It’s not enough to simply avoid using your competitors’ names in your ads.
If you’re targeting branded keywords and Google considers your ad “generic,” they may limit your impressions.
Example: Targeting “American Airlines” as a keyword and using “Call Customer Service Now” as the ad headline.
4. Pin your domain name in your ads
Google explicitly says in its best practices and email notifications to pin your domain name to the front of your headline.
Google support reps are trained to tell you to do this when you speak with them about Limited Ad Serving.
In our experience, I’ve never seen pinning a domain help. I have seen it hurt the click-through rate in an account already struggling with a limitation.
5. Complete Advertiser Verification
Proactively going through Google’s Advertiser Verification process is helpful, and it’s something Google will require you to do if you’re flagged and wish to appeal that decision.
6. Keep disapproved assets at zero
A buildup of disapproved assets in your ad account can put you under Google’s microscope. Check the Policy section of your ad account regularly and fix any disapprovals.
Tip: Many advertisers don’t realize that Google crawls paused assets. Google will disapprove ads that haven’t run for years if they violate a policy, including things like broken landing pages and redirects.
Unfortunately, you could do all of the things listed above and still be limited. There’s no fail-safe way to prevent an ad account from being limited.
Google also has no mechanism in place to proactively prove that you’re authorized to use another company’s brand in your advertising.
We’ve tried, before creating new accounts for clients that we think are likely to be flagged, to proactively provide written agreements to Google showing that the advertiser is allowed to use the branding they’re using in the ads and landing pages. Google won’t accept the documentation. You have to wait to be flagged and then submit an appeal.
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What to do if Google limits your account
If you’re hit with Limited Ad Serving, start by following the prevention strategies listed above.
If you don’t need to target branded keywords, remove them from your campaigns. Then, collect any documentation you have proving that you’re allowed to use the branding in your ads and landing pages.
Submit an appeal to Google here. If you’re an agency, submit the child CID, not your agency ID.
If Google denies your appeal
In our experience, Google rarely accepts initial appeals. Instead, you’ll likely receive an email similar to what’s pictured below within one to five business days after you submit your appeal.




View this email as the beginning of the story, not the end.
Most of our successes appealing Limited Ad Serving required significant back-and-forth with Google support and sometimes our agency-level Google reps.
Send a respectful reply to this email, including the following:
Detail the actions you’ve taken to prevent the people seeing and clicking your ads from being misled about which brand they’re engaging with.
Include a video showing your ads and landing pages, and explain in the video why nothing is misleading.
Attach any documentation you have that shows you’re authorized to use the brands/logos you’re using.
This is usually a long and painful process, but sometimes there’s light at the end of the tunnel in the form of an email like this:




Common questions about Limited Ad Serving
If I hide the notification, how do I know I’m still limited?



You’ll have to ask Google support.
If I stop targeting branded keywords, will Google lift the limitation on its own?



Possibly. Google says it reevaluates accounts regularly and will remove a limitation if it’s no longer necessary.
How long does it take to get Limited Ad Serving removed?



If you’re lucky, Google will accept your first appeal, usually within one to five business days of the appeal’s submission.
More likely, you’ll need to have back-and-forth with Google support that can last weeks, months, or even years.
Can the limitation come back after Google lifts it?



Yes, Google could apply the limitation again to you, although we don’t often see this happen unless the advertiser makes significant changes to their keywords or business model.
a customer you lose.
      
See who’s stealing your traffic
    
What to do this week
If you’re already limited:
Review your ad copy and landing pages for anything that could make consumers think they’re engaging directly with another brand.
Remove branded keywords you don’t need to target.
Gather documentation showing you’re authorized to use the brands and logos in your ads and landing pages.
Submit an appeal if you haven’t already, or continue working with Google support if you have.
If you’re not limited:
Complete Advertiser Verification.
Fix any disapproved assets in your ad account.
Identify branded keywords in your account and review the associated ad copy and landing pages.
Make sure consumers can clearly tell which company they’re engaging with when they click your ads.

Google can limit ad serving without disapproving your ads. Learn what puts accounts at risk, how to spot a limitation, and how to appeal.

Limited Ad Serving: Why Google Ads suddenly show less often

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="How to build a defensible SEO budget for 2027" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Show leadership what your SEO investment protects, where growth is justified, and which bets are worth testing as search keeps changing.


<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="How to build a defensible SEO budget for 2027" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/How-to-build-a-defensible-SEO-budget-for-2027-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The simplest way to defend your <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo">SEO</a> budget has been to point to growth indicators like improved rankings and increased organic traffic. Usually, the story was simple enough to fit on a slide or two. Now, that story is becoming a lot harder to tell.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In the first four months of 2026, <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-zero-click-searches-2026-study-479717">more than two-thirds</a> of U.S. Google searches ended without a click. Users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of Google visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits when no summary appeared, according to the <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pew Research Center</a>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">As search behavior changes, that creates a budget problem. The assumptions behind an annual budget can easily change well before the year ends.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">To make a strong case for SEO in 2027, it’s increasingly important to factor in what your CFO cares about — business risk, customer acquisition costs, and pipeline. That same business-first thinking can help shape the budget itself. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For 2027, treat your SEO budget as a portfolio rather than one unified channel budget.</p>



<h2 id="h-protect-what-already-works-with-the-maintenance-floor" class="wp-block-heading">Protect what already works with the maintenance floor</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A significant portion of SEO spending should go to maintaining assets or infrastructure the business already depends on. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For example, a mature site may have pages, local listings, technical infrastructure, and third-party references that generate qualified demand. But those assets don’t just maintain themselves. Over time, search changes, and information becomes stale.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Think of the maintenance floor as the cost of protecting the <a href="https://searchengineland.com/build-more-complete-seo-roi-model-480577">value of SEO</a>. Instead of relying on a forecast, you have to determine the cost of maintaining the assets the business relies on.</p>


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<h2 id="h-fund-evidence-backed-growth-with-the-growth-budget" class="wp-block-heading">Fund evidence-backed growth with the growth budget</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Everything beyond the maintenance floor is a wager on future value. Just because you funded it last year doesn’t mean it deserves funding again next year.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Translate each line item into the business problem it solves. For instance:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Technical SEO may improve a key customer path.</li>



<li>Content may answer questions before a decision.</li>



<li>AI visibility tools may tell you whether the company surfaces decisions accurately.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The growth budget should go where you see evidence of a problem or opportunity and a reasonable connection to a business outcome.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But be clear about what you can prove and what the evidence merely suggests. Outcomes like qualified leads, revenue, and pipeline are easier to connect to the business.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Other results only suggest that search may play a part. For example, blue links or mentions in responses to high-value questions, increases in branded search, and AI citations all indicate a connection to SEO.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google’s rollout of dedicated <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Search Console reports for generative AI</a> features makes some of these connections easier to see. But they don’t reconstruct every path from finding a brand to buying it, so <a href="https://searchengineland.com/geo-investment-attribution-482108">perfect attribution</a> remains impossible.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For every meaningful growth expense, ask what outcome it supports, which evidence shows the opportunity exists, how long it deserves funding, and what would make you adjust the investment.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In 2027, you may need to revisit these questions while the budget is still in effect. Growth spending should keep earning its place as the evidence changes.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-budget-conversation-cfo-481946">How to win SEO budget conversations with your CFO</a></em></strong>



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<h2 id="h-set-aside-money-for-the-experimentation-budget" class="wp-block-heading">Set aside money for the experimentation budget</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The commercial value of emerging search behavior can change faster than an annual budget cycle. For example, Adobe reports that AI-referred visitors to U.S. retail sites converted <a href="https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable" target="_blank" rel="noopener">42% better</a> than non-AI traffic in March 2026. This is a significant increase from findings a year earlier, when Adobe found AI-referred traffic converted 38% worse.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Don’t wait for search behavior to settle down. Instead, budget for uncertainty. Create an experimentation budget for questions the company genuinely needs to answer:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Can improving an existing high-value page increase AI visibility?</li>



<li>Are third-party sources shaping brand representation?</li>



<li>Does AI-referred traffic convert differently for the company?</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Each experiment should have a hypothesis, a way to measure it, a deadline, and a decision attached to the result.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Sometimes these experiments might seem like failures. But learning that some shiny new search tactic doesn’t deserve more funding is still valuable information. You’re paying to learn without wagering your entire budget on today’s assumptions.</p>



<h2 id="h-build-scenarios-into-the-budget" class="wp-block-heading">Build scenarios into the budget</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Avoid budgeting for a single SEO forecast. Instead, develop scenarios:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>A defensive scenario funds the maintenance floor.</li>



<li>An expected scenario adds the growth opportunities with the strongest evidence.</li>



<li>An expansion scenario shows where extra money can go if new search behavior or successful experiments justify it.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Scenario planning gives leadership options before the year begins. A reallocation rule keeps those options open once the budget is approved and the evidence starts changing.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Anything above the maintenance floor should have a condition for continued investment.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Not every SEO investment will prove itself on the same timetable. But with this framework, you decide in advance what signs would justify continuing, increasing, reducing, or redirecting that investment.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/dont-kill-your-seo-budget-shift-it-459025">Don’t kill your SEO budget, shift it</a></em></strong>


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<h2 id="h-building-a-defensible-seo-budget" class="wp-block-heading">Building a defensible SEO budget</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO teams will face uncomfortable questions in 2027. We still won’t see exactly how every search interaction contributes to a sale, and AI search will create opportunities while making some familiar measurements less useful.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The goal is to show which investments maintain existing value, which have credible growth potential, which unknowns are worth paying to resolve, and which activities no longer deserve funding.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The annual SEO budget is becoming less of a promise and more of a working hypothesis. This is what we believe deserves funding now, this is the evidence behind it, and this is what will make us change our minds.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In 2027, the strongest SEO budget will be the one designed to adapt when the evidence does.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/wait-see-seo-strategy-483348">The hidden cost of a ‘wait and see’ SEO strategy</a></em></strong>

The simplest way to defend your SEO budget has been to point to growth indicators like improved rankings and increased organic traffic. Usually, the story was simple enough to fit on a slide or two. Now, that story is becoming a lot harder to tell.
In the first four months of 2026, more than two-thirds of U.S. Google searches ended without a click. Users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of Google visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits when no summary appeared, according to the Pew Research Center.
As search behavior changes, that creates a budget problem. The assumptions behind an annual budget can easily change well before the year ends.
To make a strong case for SEO in 2027, it’s increasingly important to factor in what your CFO cares about — business risk, customer acquisition costs, and pipeline. That same business-first thinking can help shape the budget itself. 
For 2027, treat your SEO budget as a portfolio rather than one unified channel budget.
Protect what already works with the maintenance floor
A significant portion of SEO spending should go to maintaining assets or infrastructure the business already depends on. 
For example, a mature site may have pages, local listings, technical infrastructure, and third-party references that generate qualified demand. But those assets don’t just maintain themselves. Over time, search changes, and information becomes stale.
Think of the maintenance floor as the cost of protecting the value of SEO. Instead of relying on a forecast, you have to determine the cost of maintaining the assets the business relies on.
customers find first.
      
Start your free trial
    
Fund evidence-backed growth with the growth budget
Everything beyond the maintenance floor is a wager on future value. Just because you funded it last year doesn’t mean it deserves funding again next year.
Translate each line item into the business problem it solves. For instance:
Technical SEO may improve a key customer path.
Content may answer questions before a decision.
AI visibility tools may tell you whether the company surfaces decisions accurately.
The growth budget should go where you see evidence of a problem or opportunity and a reasonable connection to a business outcome.
But be clear about what you can prove and what the evidence merely suggests. Outcomes like qualified leads, revenue, and pipeline are easier to connect to the business.
Other results only suggest that search may play a part. For example, blue links or mentions in responses to high-value questions, increases in branded search, and AI citations all indicate a connection to SEO.
Google’s rollout of dedicated Search Console reports for generative AI features makes some of these connections easier to see. But they don’t reconstruct every path from finding a brand to buying it, so perfect attribution remains impossible.
For every meaningful growth expense, ask what outcome it supports, which evidence shows the opportunity exists, how long it deserves funding, and what would make you adjust the investment.
In 2027, you may need to revisit these questions while the budget is still in effect. Growth spending should keep earning its place as the evidence changes.
Dig deeper: How to win SEO budget conversations with your CFO




	
	
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
Set aside money for the experimentation budget
The commercial value of emerging search behavior can change faster than an annual budget cycle. For example, Adobe reports that AI-referred visitors to U.S. retail sites converted 42% better than non-AI traffic in March 2026. This is a significant increase from findings a year earlier, when Adobe found AI-referred traffic converted 38% worse.
Don’t wait for search behavior to settle down. Instead, budget for uncertainty. Create an experimentation budget for questions the company genuinely needs to answer:
Can improving an existing high-value page increase AI visibility?
Are third-party sources shaping brand representation?
Does AI-referred traffic convert differently for the company?
Each experiment should have a hypothesis, a way to measure it, a deadline, and a decision attached to the result.
Sometimes these experiments might seem like failures. But learning that some shiny new search tactic doesn’t deserve more funding is still valuable information. You’re paying to learn without wagering your entire budget on today’s assumptions.
Build scenarios into the budget
Avoid budgeting for a single SEO forecast. Instead, develop scenarios:
A defensive scenario funds the maintenance floor.
An expected scenario adds the growth opportunities with the strongest evidence.
An expansion scenario shows where extra money can go if new search behavior or successful experiments justify it.
Scenario planning gives leadership options before the year begins. A reallocation rule keeps those options open once the budget is approved and the evidence starts changing.
Anything above the maintenance floor should have a condition for continued investment.
Not every SEO investment will prove itself on the same timetable. But with this framework, you decide in advance what signs would justify continuing, increasing, reducing, or redirecting that investment.
Dig deeper: Don’t kill your SEO budget, shift it



  
before your competitors.
      
Start your free trial
    
Building a defensible SEO budget
SEO teams will face uncomfortable questions in 2027. We still won’t see exactly how every search interaction contributes to a sale, and AI search will create opportunities while making some familiar measurements less useful.
The goal is to show which investments maintain existing value, which have credible growth potential, which unknowns are worth paying to resolve, and which activities no longer deserve funding.
The annual SEO budget is becoming less of a promise and more of a working hypothesis. This is what we believe deserves funding now, this is the evidence behind it, and this is what will make us change our minds.
In 2027, the strongest SEO budget will be the one designed to adapt when the evidence does.
Dig deeper: The hidden cost of a ‘wait and see’ SEO strategy

Show leadership what your SEO investment protects, where growth is justified, and which bets are worth testing as search keeps changing.

How to build a defensible SEO budget for 2027

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>The latests Gemini model was unlikely to link or cite its sources. Google has confirmed the issue and will push a fix soon.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-flash-logo-1920-1-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google <a href="https://searchengineland.com/gemini-3-8-flash-rolling-out-in-google-search-486630">launched Gemini 3.8 Flash</a> yesterday and incorporated it into AI Mode for Google AI Pro &amp; Ultra subscribers but there was an issue with this model &#8211; it didn&#8217;t link or cite sources within its AI responses.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google has confirmed the issue and said it will roll out a fix shortly.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What is the issue. </strong>In short, Google AI Mode stopped linking or citing sources within its responses, especially for top-of-the-funnel types of queries.  I reported on the issue this morning on the <a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-mode-gemini-38-no-links-42011.html">Search Engine Roundtable</a> based on Gagan Ghotra&#8217;s <a href="https://x.com/gaganghotra_/status/2095298509469810837">screenshots</a> on X that showed this in action. Here are some of those screenshots:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1822" height="2048" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-ai-mode-gemini-38-no-linksb-KUNI0qDb-scaled.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-486894" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-ai-mode-gemini-38-no-linksb-KUNI0qDb-scaled.jpg 1822w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-ai-mode-gemini-38-no-linksb-KUNI0qDb-768x863.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/google-ai-mode-gemini-38-no-linksb-KUNI0qDb-1367x1536.jpg 1367w" sizes="(max-width: 1822px) 100vw, 1822px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Glenn Gabe also posted <a href="https://x.com/glenngabe/status/2095483619284251044">screenshots</a> on X of the issue:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="900" height="924" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/HRSnAYibsAAVycW.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-486895" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/HRSnAYibsAAVycW.jpg 900w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/HRSnAYibsAAVycW-768x788.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What Google said. </strong>Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, <a href="https://x.com/rmstein/status/2095664601023361501">responded</a> to me on X just now saying:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;Hey &#8212; thanks for flagging. This isn&#8217;t working as intended, and we’ll roll out a fix soon.&#8221;</p>
</blockquote>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care. </strong>Google has been promising to link more, in a way that supports the web ecosystem. This latest release seemed to have stopped linking altogether.  It seems to have been a bug with the latest Gemini model and Google should be releasing a fix soon.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The good news was that this bug only impacted those using Gemini 3.8 Flash, which was only paid subscribers at this point. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Fixed. </strong>This was fixed the following morning:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-x wp-block-embed-x"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">OK, looks like Gemini 3.8 Flash is now providing links. When it first rolled out, there was a bug and there were barely any links being provided. <a href="https://x.com/gaganghotra_?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@gaganghotra_</a> was the first to report that and I saw that as well (and shared some screenshots). Here is what the AI Mode response… <a href="https://t.co/gaa8QFFvYJ">https://t.co/gaa8QFFvYJ</a> <a href="https://t.co/tOzCylXV8Z">pic.twitter.com/tOzCylXV8Z</a>&mdash; Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) <a href="https://x.com/glenngabe/status/2095824328667333033?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 4, 2026</a></blockquote>
</div></figure>


Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash yesterday and incorporated it into AI Mode for Google AI Pro & Ultra subscribers but there was an issue with this model – it didn’t link or cite sources within its AI responses.
Google has confirmed the issue and said it will roll out a fix shortly.
What is the issue. In short, Google AI Mode stopped linking or citing sources within its responses, especially for top-of-the-funnel types of queries.  I reported on the issue this morning on the Search Engine Roundtable based on Gagan Ghotra’s screenshots on X that showed this in action. Here are some of those screenshots:




Glenn Gabe also posted screenshots on X of the issue:




What Google said. Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, responded to me on X just now saying:
“Hey — thanks for flagging. This isn’t working as intended, and we’ll roll out a fix soon.”
Why we care. Google has been promising to link more, in a way that supports the web ecosystem. This latest release seemed to have stopped linking altogether.  It seems to have been a bug with the latest Gemini model and Google should be releasing a fix soon.
The good news was that this bug only impacted those using Gemini 3.8 Flash, which was only paid subscribers at this point. 
Fixed. This was fixed the following morning:


OK, looks like Gemini 3.8 Flash is now providing links. When it first rolled out, there was a bug and there were barely any links being provided. @gaganghotra_ was the first to report that and I saw that as well (and shared some screenshots). Here is what the AI Mode response… https://t.co/gaa8QFFvYJ pic.twitter.com/tOzCylXV8Z— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 4, 2026

The latests Gemini model was unlikely to link or cite its sources. Google has confirmed the issue and will push a fix soon.

Google to fix citation bug with Gemini 3.8 Flash in AI Mode

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Your Schema Says One Thing. Google&#039;s NLP Sees Another. That Gap Is Your Content Strategy" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy-1200x675.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>See how to audit entity recognition, uncover competitor advantages, and strengthen your brand's visibility. Join us for the next SMX Now.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Your Schema Says One Thing. Google&#039;s NLP Sees Another. That Gap Is Your Content Strategy" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/smx-now-schema-google-nlp-content-strategy-1200x675.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Your schema tells search engines what your brand is. But that doesn’t mean Google’s systems understand it the same way.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That gap can reveal where your content strategy is falling short.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Our next <strong>SMX Now</strong> on Sept. 16 at 1 p.m. ET will feature Ray Martinez, VP of SEO at Archer Education. He’ll show you how to measure the difference between the entities you define and the ones Google’s natural language processing (NLP) actually recognizes.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">You’ll learn how to build an entity audit using schema.org markup, the Google Cloud Natural Language API, and an agentic coding tool such as Antigravity, Claude Code, or Codex. The process turns your existing schema into a queryable knowledge graph, then compares it with competitor content to uncover topics they cover, gaps they miss, and entities Google doesn’t yet connect with your brand.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Martinez will also show you how to turn those findings into action. You’ll learn how to create content around under-recognized entities, strengthen those connections with structured data and internal data, and make your pages more retrievable and citable across search and AI engines.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">You’ll leave with a repeatable way to measure discoverability, find content opportunities, and track whether Google and AI systems are getting better at understanding what your brand actually does.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><a href="https://www.bigmarker.com/third-door-media/your-schema-says-one-thing-google-s-nlp-sees-another-that-gap-is-your-content-strategy?utm_bmcr_source=SMXNow">Save your spot</a></strong>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">


Your schema tells search engines what your brand is. But that doesn’t mean Google’s systems understand it the same way.
That gap can reveal where your content strategy is falling short.
Our next SMX Now on Sept. 16 at 1 p.m. ET will feature Ray Martinez, VP of SEO at Archer Education. He’ll show you how to measure the difference between the entities you define and the ones Google’s natural language processing (NLP) actually recognizes.
You’ll learn how to build an entity audit using schema.org markup, the Google Cloud Natural Language API, and an agentic coding tool such as Antigravity, Claude Code, or Codex. The process turns your existing schema into a queryable knowledge graph, then compares it with competitor content to uncover topics they cover, gaps they miss, and entities Google doesn’t yet connect with your brand.
Martinez will also show you how to turn those findings into action. You’ll learn how to create content around under-recognized entities, strengthen those connections with structured data and internal data, and make your pages more retrievable and citable across search and AI engines.
You’ll leave with a repeatable way to measure discoverability, find content opportunities, and track whether Google and AI systems are getting better at understanding what your brand actually does.
Save your spot

See how to audit entity recognition, uncover competitor advantages, and strengthen your brand's visibility. Join us for the next SMX Now.

SMX Now: Find the entity gaps holding back your content strategy

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="The SEO warning signs that appear before organic traffic falls" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>A healthy traffic graph can mask lost commercial visibility. Find the signals hiding in your rankings, queries, landing pages, and leads.


<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="The SEO warning signs that appear before organic traffic falls" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/The-SEO-warning-signs-that-appear-before-organic-traffic-falls-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A significant drop in <a href="https://searchengineland.com/organic-traffic-worth-tracking-478451">organic traffic</a> is easy to spot. The harder part is recognizing when performance is weakening before that drop appears in a monthly report.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Organic performance rarely deteriorates without leaving clues. A commercially important page might start slipping for a handful of searches. Google may switch between URLs for queries that previously had a clear ranking page. Impressions can increase while clicks level off. Overall traffic can even look healthy while fewer visitors reach the pages responsible for leads and sales.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">None of these changes necessarily looks serious on its own. A five-position drop across a handful of high-intent searches can matter more commercially than hundreds of new low-value rankings, yet those rankings can make the report look positive.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/seo-reporting">SEO reporting</a> tells you what changed. <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/how-to-interpret-seo-data">SEO analysis</a> should explain whether it matters and why.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">By the time the main traffic graph turns red, the useful warning may already be months old.</p>



<h2 id="h-stable-rankings-can-hide-an-unstable-page" class="wp-block-heading">Stable rankings can hide an unstable page</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A keyword might have remained around Position 4 for several months. On the surface, there’s nothing particularly concerning about that. Look at the ranking URL over the same period, however, and a different picture emerges.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Consider an accountancy firm with a dedicated R&amp;D tax relief service page. The page has historically ranked for commercially important searches and has been built around somebody considering professional help.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google then starts ranking an older R&amp;D guide instead. A few weeks later, the service page returns. Then the guide replaces it again.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The position itself may barely change, so a standard ranking report can make performance appear stable. What isn’t stable is Google’s choice of page.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There may be too much overlap between the guide and service page. Internal linking may not make their purposes clear enough. The service page may have fallen behind competing results, or the search intent itself may have shifted.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There’s a commercial issue, too. Someone arriving on a service page designed to demonstrate expertise and generate an inquiry has a different journey from somebody landing on an old informational guide.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For important searches, watch the URL as closely as the position. If Google repeatedly changes its mind about which page should rank, find out why.</p>


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<h2 id="h-rising-impressions-don-t-always-mean-better-performance" class="wp-block-heading">Rising impressions don&#8217;t always mean better performance</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">An ecommerce business might see impressions increase by 40% year over year. Presented without context, that can easily become the headline in an SEO report.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If clicks have increased by only 4%, the picture is less straightforward.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Take a company selling commercial coffee machines. The site begins to appear much more frequently in searches for cleaning machines, fault-finding, and general maintenance. Those searches generate thousands of additional impressions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">At the same time, clicks for terms related to commercial coffee machines, office coffee machines, and other important product categories begin to decline.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The top-level Search Console graph can still look encouraging because informational visibility is masking the decline in commercial searches. Separate those two types of visibility to see what’s really happening.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Look at the queries responsible for the increase and the pages receiving those impressions. A business selling expensive commercial equipment should care more about losing visibility among people comparing machines than gaining thousands of impressions from people trying to descale one they already own.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Both have value. They don&#8217;t have the same commercial value.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/make-seo-strategy-more-commercially-aware-481779">How to make your SEO strategy more commercially aware</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-look-at-why-competitors-deserve-the-ranking" class="wp-block-heading">Look at why competitors deserve the ranking</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Competitor analysis can become too dependent on tools.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A competitor ranks for 5,000 keywords. Your site ranks for 3,000. A gap analysis produces 2,000 terms, and the conclusion is that more content needs to be created.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Sometimes it does. But keyword counts don&#8217;t explain why one business is becoming a stronger search result than another.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Take two industrial flooring companies competing for warehouse flooring searches.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>The first has a perfectly reasonable service page. It explains the available flooring types, talks about durability, and provides a way to request a quote.</li>



<li>The competing page answers the questions a facilities manager is likely to have before making contact: Can the warehouse stay open during installation? How long before forklifts can use the floor? What happens if the existing concrete is damaged? Which flooring system works best for heavy traffic? It also shows previous installations and what was involved.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The difference isn&#8217;t simply word count or keyword coverage. One page makes it easier for a potential customer to assess the supplier.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When a competitor starts gaining ground, ask what their page helps the customer understand, verify, or decide that yours doesn&#8217;t. That often exposes the real content gap much faster than another keyword export.</p>



<h2 id="h-successful-pages-can-become-weaker-without-changing" class="wp-block-heading">Successful pages can become weaker without changing</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There’s an understandable reluctance to interfere with pages that rank well. A service page ranks in the top three positions, driving relevant traffic and generating inquiries. Nobody wants to make unnecessary changes and discover a month later that performance has fallen.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Leaving a page untouched is still a decision. A page can become relatively weaker without becoming objectively worse.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Imagine a service page that was one of the best results in its market three years ago. The page hasn&#8217;t changed, but competitors have added better case studies, answered more specific questions, improved photographs, explained costs, and provided stronger evidence.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The original page hasn&#8217;t deteriorated. The standard around it has improved.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Reviewing successful pages doesn&#8217;t mean rewriting them every few months. It means checking whether they&#8217;re still as useful and convincing as the pages competing against them.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Customer conversations are particularly useful here. If prospects regularly ask how long something takes, explain it. If they worry about disruption, address it. If the business has completed stronger projects since the page was written, show them.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The questions people ask before buying are often better content prompts than another keyword export. SEO isn&#8217;t only about finding new opportunities. Some of the most valuable work is protecting the visibility that&#8217;s already making money.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/new-seo-kpis">New SEO KPIs you’re missing: How to measure SEO beyond clicks</a></em></strong>



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<h2 id="h-traffic-growth-can-hide-commercial-decline" class="wp-block-heading">Traffic growth can hide commercial decline</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One of the easiest mistakes in SEO reporting is assuming that more organic traffic means better organic performance.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Consider a solicitor&#8217;s website where organic traffic has increased by 22% year over year. At first glance, SEO appears to be performing strongly.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When the landing pages are separated, most of the increase comes from three informational articles. One broad employment law article has started attracting several thousand visits each month.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The service pages tell a different story. Clicks to the main employment law page have fallen. Visibility around settlement agreements is weaker. Searches from people actively looking for an employment solicitor are producing fewer visits.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The website has more organic traffic than it did a year ago. It may also be receiving fewer commercially valuable visits.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Informational traffic isn&#8217;t worthless. It can introduce people to a business and demonstrate expertise. But it shouldn&#8217;t obscure what&#8217;s happening elsewhere.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For lead generation sites, separate service page performance from advice content. For ecommerce, look at category and product performance alongside editorial traffic.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The more complicated a website becomes, the less useful one overall organic traffic number becomes.</p>



<h2 id="h-when-leads-fall-before-traffic-investigate-the-traffic" class="wp-block-heading">When leads fall before traffic, investigate the traffic</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A fall in organic leads with relatively stable traffic is often treated as a conversion issue. It might be. But look at the search data before reaching that conclusion.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Suppose organic sessions are down 1%, while inquiries from organic landing pages have fallen 25%. Start with the query mix.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A handful of high-intent terms may have slipped from Positions 2 and 3 to Positions 5 and 6. Across an entire website, those movements may barely affect an average ranking metric. For the business, they can matter considerably.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Traffic composition may also have changed. The site might have gained informational visits while losing people searching directly for its services. Google may be sending users to different landing pages, or one location or service could be responsible for most of the decline.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Then speak to the people handling the inquiries.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Has lead quality changed? </li>



<li>Are prospects asking different questions? </li>



<li>Has price become more important? </li>



<li>Has a competitor introduced an offer that changes what customers expect?</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO data can tell you what people searched for and where they landed. It can&#8217;t tell you everything that happened afterward.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When leads fall, focus on understanding what changed rather than establishing whether SEO is to blame.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/the-dark-seo-funnel-why-traffic-no-longer-proves-seo-success-470334">The dark SEO funnel: Why traffic no longer proves SEO success</a></em></strong>


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<h2 id="h-look-for-where-the-numbers-stop-agreeing" class="wp-block-heading">Look for where the numbers stop agreeing</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Rankings can remain stable while the wrong page starts ranking. Impressions can grow while commercially valuable clicks decline. Traffic can increase while service pages lose visitors. Leads can fall while sitewide traffic barely changes.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Individually, each metric can tell a positive story. The interesting part is what happens when they&#8217;re compared.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If impressions are rising but clicks aren&#8217;t, find out where the additional impressions are coming from. If traffic is growing but inquiries aren&#8217;t, separate the pages and queries generating that growth. If rankings are stable but Google keeps changing the URL, investigate why.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">And if the numbers in the SEO report look healthy while the business says otherwise, don&#8217;t dismiss the business. Investigate the difference.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Good SEO analysis isn&#8217;t about finding a green number to put in a report. It&#8217;s about understanding how rankings, queries, pages, traffic, and commercial results relate to each other.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">By the time organic traffic falls sharply, you&#8217;re investigating what has already happened. The real opportunity is spotting the problem while the headline numbers still look fine.</p>

A significant drop in organic traffic is easy to spot. The harder part is recognizing when performance is weakening before that drop appears in a monthly report.
Organic performance rarely deteriorates without leaving clues. A commercially important page might start slipping for a handful of searches. Google may switch between URLs for queries that previously had a clear ranking page. Impressions can increase while clicks level off. Overall traffic can even look healthy while fewer visitors reach the pages responsible for leads and sales.
None of these changes necessarily looks serious on its own. A five-position drop across a handful of high-intent searches can matter more commercially than hundreds of new low-value rankings, yet those rankings can make the report look positive.
SEO reporting tells you what changed. SEO analysis should explain whether it matters and why.
By the time the main traffic graph turns red, the useful warning may already be months old.
Stable rankings can hide an unstable page
A keyword might have remained around Position 4 for several months. On the surface, there’s nothing particularly concerning about that. Look at the ranking URL over the same period, however, and a different picture emerges.
Consider an accountancy firm with a dedicated R&D tax relief service page. The page has historically ranked for commercially important searches and has been built around somebody considering professional help.
Google then starts ranking an older R&D guide instead. A few weeks later, the service page returns. Then the guide replaces it again.
The position itself may barely change, so a standard ranking report can make performance appear stable. What isn’t stable is Google’s choice of page.
There may be too much overlap between the guide and service page. Internal linking may not make their purposes clear enough. The service page may have fallen behind competing results, or the search intent itself may have shifted.
There’s a commercial issue, too. Someone arriving on a service page designed to demonstrate expertise and generate an inquiry has a different journey from somebody landing on an old informational guide.
For important searches, watch the URL as closely as the position. If Google repeatedly changes its mind about which page should rank, find out why.
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Rising impressions don’t always mean better performance
An ecommerce business might see impressions increase by 40% year over year. Presented without context, that can easily become the headline in an SEO report.
If clicks have increased by only 4%, the picture is less straightforward.
Take a company selling commercial coffee machines. The site begins to appear much more frequently in searches for cleaning machines, fault-finding, and general maintenance. Those searches generate thousands of additional impressions.
At the same time, clicks for terms related to commercial coffee machines, office coffee machines, and other important product categories begin to decline.
The top-level Search Console graph can still look encouraging because informational visibility is masking the decline in commercial searches. Separate those two types of visibility to see what’s really happening.
Look at the queries responsible for the increase and the pages receiving those impressions. A business selling expensive commercial equipment should care more about losing visibility among people comparing machines than gaining thousands of impressions from people trying to descale one they already own.
Both have value. They don’t have the same commercial value.
Dig deeper: How to make your SEO strategy more commercially aware



Look at why competitors deserve the ranking
Competitor analysis can become too dependent on tools.
A competitor ranks for 5,000 keywords. Your site ranks for 3,000. A gap analysis produces 2,000 terms, and the conclusion is that more content needs to be created.
Sometimes it does. But keyword counts don’t explain why one business is becoming a stronger search result than another.
Take two industrial flooring companies competing for warehouse flooring searches.
The first has a perfectly reasonable service page. It explains the available flooring types, talks about durability, and provides a way to request a quote.
The competing page answers the questions a facilities manager is likely to have before making contact: Can the warehouse stay open during installation? How long before forklifts can use the floor? What happens if the existing concrete is damaged? Which flooring system works best for heavy traffic? It also shows previous installations and what was involved.
The difference isn’t simply word count or keyword coverage. One page makes it easier for a potential customer to assess the supplier.
When a competitor starts gaining ground, ask what their page helps the customer understand, verify, or decide that yours doesn’t. That often exposes the real content gap much faster than another keyword export.
Successful pages can become weaker without changing
There’s an understandable reluctance to interfere with pages that rank well. A service page ranks in the top three positions, driving relevant traffic and generating inquiries. Nobody wants to make unnecessary changes and discover a month later that performance has fallen.
Leaving a page untouched is still a decision. A page can become relatively weaker without becoming objectively worse.
Imagine a service page that was one of the best results in its market three years ago. The page hasn’t changed, but competitors have added better case studies, answered more specific questions, improved photographs, explained costs, and provided stronger evidence.
The original page hasn’t deteriorated. The standard around it has improved.
Reviewing successful pages doesn’t mean rewriting them every few months. It means checking whether they’re still as useful and convincing as the pages competing against them.
Customer conversations are particularly useful here. If prospects regularly ask how long something takes, explain it. If they worry about disruption, address it. If the business has completed stronger projects since the page was written, show them.
The questions people ask before buying are often better content prompts than another keyword export. SEO isn’t only about finding new opportunities. Some of the most valuable work is protecting the visibility that’s already making money.
Dig deeper: New SEO KPIs you’re missing: How to measure SEO beyond clicks




	
	
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Traffic growth can hide commercial decline
One of the easiest mistakes in SEO reporting is assuming that more organic traffic means better organic performance.
Consider a solicitor’s website where organic traffic has increased by 22% year over year. At first glance, SEO appears to be performing strongly.
When the landing pages are separated, most of the increase comes from three informational articles. One broad employment law article has started attracting several thousand visits each month.
The service pages tell a different story. Clicks to the main employment law page have fallen. Visibility around settlement agreements is weaker. Searches from people actively looking for an employment solicitor are producing fewer visits.
The website has more organic traffic than it did a year ago. It may also be receiving fewer commercially valuable visits.
Informational traffic isn’t worthless. It can introduce people to a business and demonstrate expertise. But it shouldn’t obscure what’s happening elsewhere.
For lead generation sites, separate service page performance from advice content. For ecommerce, look at category and product performance alongside editorial traffic.
The more complicated a website becomes, the less useful one overall organic traffic number becomes.
When leads fall before traffic, investigate the traffic
A fall in organic leads with relatively stable traffic is often treated as a conversion issue. It might be. But look at the search data before reaching that conclusion.
Suppose organic sessions are down 1%, while inquiries from organic landing pages have fallen 25%. Start with the query mix.
A handful of high-intent terms may have slipped from Positions 2 and 3 to Positions 5 and 6. Across an entire website, those movements may barely affect an average ranking metric. For the business, they can matter considerably.
Traffic composition may also have changed. The site might have gained informational visits while losing people searching directly for its services. Google may be sending users to different landing pages, or one location or service could be responsible for most of the decline.
Then speak to the people handling the inquiries.
Has lead quality changed? 
Are prospects asking different questions? 
Has price become more important? 
Has a competitor introduced an offer that changes what customers expect?
SEO data can tell you what people searched for and where they landed. It can’t tell you everything that happened afterward.
When leads fall, focus on understanding what changed rather than establishing whether SEO is to blame.
Dig deeper: The dark SEO funnel: Why traffic no longer proves SEO success



  
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Look for where the numbers stop agreeing
Rankings can remain stable while the wrong page starts ranking. Impressions can grow while commercially valuable clicks decline. Traffic can increase while service pages lose visitors. Leads can fall while sitewide traffic barely changes.
Individually, each metric can tell a positive story. The interesting part is what happens when they’re compared.
If impressions are rising but clicks aren’t, find out where the additional impressions are coming from. If traffic is growing but inquiries aren’t, separate the pages and queries generating that growth. If rankings are stable but Google keeps changing the URL, investigate why.
And if the numbers in the SEO report look healthy while the business says otherwise, don’t dismiss the business. Investigate the difference.
Good SEO analysis isn’t about finding a green number to put in a report. It’s about understanding how rankings, queries, pages, traffic, and commercial results relate to each other.
By the time organic traffic falls sharply, you’re investigating what has already happened. The real opportunity is spotting the problem while the headline numbers still look fine.

A healthy traffic graph can mask lost commercial visibility. Find the signals hiding in your rankings, queries, landing pages, and leads.

The SEO warning signs before organic traffic falls

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/3-SEO-priorities-to-win-organic-traffic-in-2027.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="3 SEO priorities to win organic traffic in 2027" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/3-SEO-priorities-to-win-organic-traffic-in-2027.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/3-SEO-priorities-to-win-organic-traffic-in-2027-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/3-SEO-priorities-to-win-organic-traffic-in-2027-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/3-SEO-priorities-to-win-organic-traffic-in-2027-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Prioritize commercial content, make your best answers easy to extract, and build authority signals for organic and AI search visibility.

Organic search will still drive demand in 2027, but winning that traffic requires more deliberate prioritization. AI answers are intercepting more searches, changing the value of a traditional ranking, and making visibility beyond the blue links increasingly important.
The fundamentals of SEO still matter. What’s changing is where you put your resources and how you define success. Commercial pages may be more valuable than high-volume informational content, while earning a citation in an AI answer can matter alongside earning a traditional ranking.
Three priorities should guide your SEO strategy: allocate content by funnel stage, create deeper and more structured content, and build authority through strategic markup, links, and brand mentions.
1. Funnel-driven content allocation
The most important decision is where you play in the funnel.
AI is affecting the top of the funnel (TOFU) more than other stages. The middle has also lost much of the protection it once had.
Informational queries are overwhelmingly zero-click, and Seer Interactive’s 2026 study puts AI Overview presence at 36% of informational queries, compared with 8% of commercial and 5% of transactional queries. By intent alone, that reads as good news for the middle of the funnel. 
Query format tells a different story: within informational queries, comparison (“X vs. Y”) formats trigger an AI Overview 95.4% of the time, and “best of” formats 81.3%. Those are the formats in which most commercial content is written, even when Google classifies the query as informational.
The allocation logic survives all of this. What has to change is what you count as a win inside it.
One counterweight worth stating plainly, because it runs counter to the doom framing: the 2025 decline didn’t continue. 
Seer’s headline 2026 finding is that organic CTR on AI Overview queries bottomed at 1.3% in December 2025 and rose to 2.4% by February 2026, an 85% rise in two months. Transactional CTR for cited brands roughly doubled over the same period. 
Seer calls this a leveling off rather than a recovery and warns against forecasting from two months of data. Neither should you.
From a SparkToro study:

Funnel stage and query type% of all searches (2024)Zero-click as published (April 2025)Zero-click updated (August 2026)AI Overview presence by intent (Seer, Apr 2026)
TOFU: Informational (“What is X?”, “How to Y?”)52.65%High (U.S. baseline 58.5%, informational skews above it)Very high (U.S. baseline now 68.01%)36%
MOFU: Commercial research (“Best X,” “X vs. Y”)14.51%Moderate (~50—60% zero-click)Rising, and highly format-dependent8% by intent, though comparison-format content is far more exposed (see below)
BOFU: Transactional + navigational (“Buy X online,” “Brand site”)32.84%Low (<20% zero-click)Still lowest, but uncited CTR fell 48% in 20255% (transactional)






Intent averages hide the thing that actually matters, which is how a query is phrased. Within informational queries, Seer found AI Overview rates varying by more than 3x depending on format:

Query format (within informational queries)AI Overview rateOrganic impressions in sample
Comparison (“X vs. Y”)95.4%79,436
Review86.3%21,221
Question (what / why / how)85.9%1,408,843
Price / cost / buy83.4%192,911
Best of81.3%105,279
Near me76.9%188,606
Single word27.3%25,042,440






Read the impressions column alongside the rates. 
Comparison queries hit 95.4%, but on 79,436 impressions in this sample, so the rate is high and the base is small. 
Question-format queries sit lower at 85.9%, but carry 1.4 million impressions, which is where most displaced clicks actually come from.
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Prioritize MOFU and BOFU for traffic and revenue
Every SEO project has limited time and resources, so we must prioritize our efforts strategically. The key question is where to focus — on a select few pages or a vast array?
The answer depends on the specific goal, but typically, the aim is to boost revenue swiftly.
Given these constraints, optimizing for middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) stages generally yields superior results than top-of-the-funnel for most websites.
“Best X” and “X vs. Y” content has traditionally been a strong way to capture mid-funnel demand. That reasoning needs qualifying. Comparison and “best of” formats are the most heavily intercepted of any Seer measured, so a page written in those formats is exposed regardless of how the underlying query gets classified.
I would still build the pages. Commercial intent behind a query like “best CRM for multi-location operators” hasn’t weakened, and Seer found that pages cited inside an AI Overview earn roughly 120% more clicks per impression than uncited pages on the same results page. 
Worth knowing the ceiling: cited pages still trail no-AI-Overview results by 38%. Citation is the best position available on an AI Overview SERP, not a return to the old baseline.
Ranking in the top three positions for these terms has delivered the biggest bottom-line impact for our clients. That still holds. It just no longer settles the outcome on its own.
To win at MOFU:
Build “best X” and “X vs. Y” content with citation in mind: original data, firsthand testing, clearly named entities, and passages a model can lift without needing the surrounding context.
Treat these pages as hubs, with focused internal linking to signal their importance.
Prioritize link acquisition around these comparison/consideration articles.
Track citations alongside position. If you rank first and the AI Overview cites three competitors, your rank tracker will report a win you didn’t get.
You also want to protect BOFU traffic and conversions. Transactional and navigational queries, such as “YourBrand login,” “product pricing,” or “coupon codes,” have the lowest zero-click rates. These terms often indicate users are ready to buy or engage.
Although search volume is smaller, conversion potential is huge. These queries are the most click-protected ground left, which is reason enough to defend them deliberately rather than assume they’ll hold.
Monitor rankings closely and fine-tune on-page elements for user experience and clarity.
Add clear calls to action and schema for pricing, product, and offer details.
Leverage remarketing to re-engage visitors who don’t convert immediately.
Use TOFU selectively to build topical authority
TOFU still matters for building topical authority, but it comes with trade-offs. 
Informational content can provide branding exposure, strengthen internal linking and site structure, and establish authority by answering core questions under your domain. However, it often requires significant effort for little short-term return, and publishing too much can hurt overall site engagement.
Focus on TOFU when a client needs to fill gaps in its topical coverage, after BOFU and MOFU opportunities have been exhausted. Your main focus should remain on MOFU and BOFU rankings.
Optimize TOFU for on-SERP value
If you target TOFU, you should embrace the reality that the real play is to win the AI Overviews. Traditional featured snippet strategies work well and should be part of your TOFU content.
Start with a one- to two-sentence definition.
Follow with clear lists or tables under H2 headings.
Write self-contained answers under question-formatted headings.
FAQ schema no longer helps here: Google retired FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026, having already restricted them to authoritative government and health sites in August 2023. For most commercial sites, the feature had been invisible for years before it formally ended.
The content pattern still earns extraction. The markup earns nothing.
2. Deep, structured content creation
After choosing your strategic funnel focus, the next step is how you create content. Traditional SEO best practices still apply, but we’ve refined our approach for sustained performance.
Comprehensive, user-centered long-form content
Across our client sites, we’ve watched indexing slow down, and large, undifferentiated blocks of text often fail to get indexed. That makes content depth, structure, and differentiation increasingly important.
This is often misread as a penalty against AI-written content. In November 2025, John Mueller was asked whether replacing AI-generated content with human-written content would help a struggling site. He said he’d focus on the value the site adds to the web, not whether the content was AI-generated, and that rewriting AI content by hand doesn’t make it authentic. The issue isn’t authorship. It’s added value.
Fewer, deeper articles can also give AI systems more to work with. For branded queries, earned media accounted for 48% of citations, commercial brand content 30%, and owned content just 23%, per Omniscient Digital. Comprehensive content that covers a topic end to end gives you more opportunities to establish expertise, earn links, and be cited.
To make your content index-worthy:
Acquire internal and external links to the page.
Include unique graphics or infographics that communicate key concepts.
Embed video demonstrations or explainer clips where relevant.
Structure for readability and machine consumption
Scannability is non-negotiable. Use clear H2 and H3 headings, HTML lists, and tables.
ChatGPT and AI Overviews can lift directly from table markup. The mechanism is extraction. Models pull passages that stand on their own, so a paragraph that only makes sense after reading the two above it is much less likely to be quoted than a table row or a definition-led sentence.
Emphasis on original research and expert insights
With AI churning out rehashed content, unique data and expert commentary can help you set yourself apart.
Google’s 2024 Content Warehouse documentation leak suggested an Original Content Score, which points in the same direction, though a leaked field name isn’t a confirmed ranking factor and shouldn’t be treated as one.
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3. Strategic markup and link authority
Two key elements — schema markup and links — still play an important role in visibility and authority.
Here’s how to use structured data for AI-driven search results and refine your link building strategy to stay ahead.
Schema markup
Schema markup makes content easier for AI crawlers to interpret. Structured data can clarify exactly what your page is about to Google.
Schema used to be a way to win SERP features. Those features are shrinking, and FAQ rich results disappeared entirely on May 7, 2026, with Search Console reporting following in June and API support ending this month. 
Its remaining value sits in machine comprehension for the systems that actually read it, telling engines what entity a page concerns and how that entity relates to others. That last part needs a caveat, because the evidence on whether AI systems read schema at all is worse than most of us assumed.
Prioritize Organization, Product, Article, and entity markup that resolves ambiguity about who you are and what you sell, and spend less time on markup chosen purely to chase a rich result.
What the schema studies actually show
This is worth sitting with before anyone on your team spends another sprint on markup for AI visibility.
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026 and compared them with 4,000 matched control pages. Adding schema produced no major uplift in citations across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, or ChatGPT. AI Overview citations fell 4.6%, the only statistically significant result. AI Mode rose 2.4%, and ChatGPT rose 2.2%, both within the noise band.
A separate searchVIU experiment tested what five systems — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode — actually read when fetching a page in real time. All five extracted visible HTML only. JSON-LD, hidden Microdata, and hidden RDFa were ignored during retrieval. 
That doesn’t establish that schema has no role in indexing or other parts of an AI system’s pipeline, but it does challenge the assumption that models simply read schema when they fetch a page.
Cyrus Shepard’s analysis of 54 AI citation studies, experiments, patents, and case studies scored 23 potential citation factors based on the strength and consistency of the evidence. Structured data landed in the middle of the pack, suggesting a modest relationship with AI citations rather than a decisive ranking signal. The analysis also noted that models don’t appear to use schema in a schema-like way.
Google’s own documentation on AI features says there are no additional technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that you don’t need special schema.org structured data or other machine-readable files to appear in those features. Google does, however, recommend making sure structured data matches the visible text on the page.
Two caveats, because the picture isn’t unanimous. Ahrefs only tested pages that were already heavily cited, so the study measures whether bolting schema onto a visible page lifts it further, not whether schema helps an unknown page get discovered. And Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel said in March 2025 that schema helps Microsoft’s models understand content for Copilot.
Where that leaves schema: Keep it for the Google Search features that still use structured data, for machine-readable accuracy, and where it helps clarify entities and relationships. But stop selling it, internally or to clients, as a proven lever for AI citation. The evidence doesn’t support that claim.
Backlinks: Quality over quantity
Backlinks remain an important signal for Google Search. Google says its link analysis systems, including PageRank, help determine what pages are about and which may be most helpful for a query. 
For AI visibility specifically, though, mentions appear to matter more than links. Branded web mentions correlated 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, compared with 0.218 for backlinks, Ahrefs found. 
A December 2025 follow-up found YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT at about 0.737. Ahrefs is explicit that these are correlations rather than proven causes, and I’d treat them the same way. 
In practice, that puts digital PR, podcast, and video presence, and your footprint on third-party communities into the same budget line as link acquisition.
However, successful link building in 2027 is less about the sheer number of links and more about their quality.
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How to measure any of this
Two recent releases made AI visibility measurable, where before it was largely anecdotal.
GA4 added a native AI Assistant channel in May 2026, classifying referrals from ChatGPT, Gemini, and others. It excludes Perplexity, isn’t retroactive, and misses app traffic that arrives without a referrer.
Search Console launched Generative AI performance reporting in June 2026, showing impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Impressions only for now, with no click data.
One thing I’d skip is llms.txt. Mueller has compared it to the old keywords meta tag, and Google’s guidance on optimizing for generative AI features says you don’t need to create machine-readable files or markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
The 2027 SEO trifecta
SEO still works. The economics of where you put your effort have changed. 
The strongest strategies will concentrate resources on commercially valuable searches, make content easier for both people and machines to understand, and build authority beyond your own site.

Prioritize commercial content, make your best answers easy to extract, and build authority signals for organic and AI search visibility.

3 SEO priorities to win organic traffic in 2027

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="What your Google Ads hour-of-day report doesn&#039;t tell you" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Smart Bidding sees the auction-level signals your hourly report can’t. Know what you’re giving up when you cut an hour.


<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="What your Google Ads hour-of-day report doesn&#039;t tell you" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/09/What-your-Google-Ads-hour-of-day-report-doesnt-tell-you-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Someone asks you to pull an hour-of-day report to identify the best-converting hours and limit wasted spend outside those hours. In many industries, especially news and publishing, you may see the 2 a.m. row, four clicks, and no conversions, and be asked to limit ad visibility during that hour.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Don’t do it. At least, not based on that report alone.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Dayparting’s role has changed. In a <a href="https://searchengineland.com/your-guide-to-google-ads-smart-bidding-453765">Smart Bidding</a> account, Google is already evaluating time of day at auction time alongside signals that an hour-of-day report can’t show you. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Manually excluding an hour doesn’t help Smart Bidding make a better decision during that period. It prevents the campaign from entering those auctions altogether.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Every campaign doesn’t need to run 24 hours a day. Advertisers need a better process for deciding when an ad schedule is actually warranted.</p>



<h2 id="h-smart-bidding-already-knows-what-time-it-is" class="wp-block-heading">Smart Bidding already knows what time it is</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/target-cpa-bidding-451823">Target CPA</a>, <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-target-roas-454747">Target ROAS</a>, <a href="https://searchengineland.com/maximize-conversions-bidding-google-ads-guide-450273">Maximize Conversions</a>, and <a href="https://searchengineland.com/maximize-conversion-value-google-ads-bidding-explained-453638">Maximize Conversion Value</a> all use auction-time bidding. Google <a href="https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7065882?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lists time of day and day of week</a> among the contextual signals Smart Bidding can use, along with signals such as device, location, and audience characteristics.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google gives the example of a restaurant where bids may differ for someone searching at 8 p.m. on a Thursday, when people are more likely to make a weekend reservation, compared with someone searching at 8 a.m. on a Monday.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Smart Bidding isn’t looking at 8 p.m. and deciding that the entire hour is good or bad. It’s evaluating individual auctions that happen during that hour.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google is also explicit about <a href="https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2732132?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">how ad schedules interact with Smart Bidding</a>. Manual ad schedule bid adjustments, such as increasing bids 20% on Tuesday afternoons, aren’t used by Smart Bidding. The actual schedule is still respected.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If you remove Tuesday morning from the schedule, your campaign can’t enter those auctions. You aren’t telling Smart Bidding to be more conservative during that period. You’re removing the period from consideration entirely.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That makes dayparting less of a bidding tactic and more of an eligibility decision.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: </em></strong><a href="https://searchengineland.com/when-to-trust-google-ads-ai-and-when-you-shouldnt-461668"><strong><em>When to trust Google Ads AI and when you shouldn’t</em></strong></a>


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<h2 id="h-before-you-exclude-an-hour-audit-the-data" class="wp-block-heading">Before you exclude an hour, audit the data</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Hour-of-day reporting is still useful. The problem comes when advertisers treat a weak row as enough evidence to change campaign eligibility. Before excluding an hour, I look at four things.</p>



<h3 id="h-1-get-enough-data-before-making-the-call" class="wp-block-heading">1. Get enough data before making the call</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There are 168 hours in a week. Once you start slicing an account across individual hours, seemingly obvious trends can be based on little traffic.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Four clicks without a conversion tell you what happened to four clicks. It doesn’t tell you that 2 a.m. is inherently unprofitable.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Instead of reacting to a few days of data, expand the date range. In many accounts, reviewing at least 60 to 90 days gives you a better chance of distinguishing a persistent pattern from a short-term fluctuation. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The right range still depends on account volume and conversion cycle. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The goal isn’t to hit an arbitrary number of days. It’s to get enough data for the pattern to repeat.</p>



<h3 id="h-2-account-for-conversion-lag" class="wp-block-heading">2. Account for conversion lag</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A click can happen now and convert hours or days later. Google Ads generally attributes conversions back to the date of the ad interaction, which means recent performance can look worse while conversions are still coming in.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google <a href="https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6239119?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recommends accounting for conversion delay</a> when evaluating performance. Its documentation warns that recent periods can appear to have fewer conversions and a higher cost per conversion because spend has already been reported, while some conversions haven’t.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Before deciding Tuesday night is underperforming on Wednesday morning, check your typical conversion delay. If the data isn’t mature, neither is the conclusion.</p>



<h3 id="h-3-look-beyond-the-hourly-average" class="wp-block-heading">3. Look beyond the hourly average</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">An hour with a poor average CPA can still contain valuable auctions. A manual schedule has no way to distinguish between them. Smart Bidding does.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Before excluding a time period, look beyond conversions and CPA. Consider conversion value, lead quality, downstream sales data, and the actual business value of the customers acquired during that period.</p>



<h3 id="h-4-test-the-restriction-instead-of-assuming-it-works" class="wp-block-heading">4. Test the restriction instead of assuming it works</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If there’s enough volume to test, test.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I saw this firsthand while managing a restaurant account. We tested restricting delivery to selected hours against allowing the campaign to remain eligible 24 hours a day. The unrestricted approach increased conversions by 12% while decreasing CPA by 3%.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The test showed that the hourly report alone hadn’t captured the value of the auctions we were removing.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If you have enough traffic, compare the scheduled approach against broader eligibility and measure the result against the KPI that actually matters to the business. Don’t assume fewer hours automatically means less waste.</p>



<h2 id="h-how-dayparting-changes-by-industry" class="wp-block-heading">How dayparting changes by industry</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The case for dayparting also depends on what happens after someone clicks. A schedule that makes sense for a call-driven business may unnecessarily restrict an account that can convert customers around the clock.</p>



<h3 id="h-news-and-publishing" class="wp-block-heading">News and publishing</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Reader demand doesn’t follow office hours. Breaking news, elections, sports, and major entertainment events can create traffic outside historically strong periods. A rigid schedule built from historical hourly averages can leave a campaign sitting out when demand suddenly changes.</p>



<h3 id="h-restaurants" class="wp-block-heading">Restaurants</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Searches and reservations can happen long after the dinner rush or before the restaurant opens. The restaurant test above is a good example of why operating hours and conversion hours shouldn’t automatically be treated as the same thing.</p>



<h3 id="h-home-services-and-lead-generation" class="wp-block-heading">Home services and lead generation</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Response time can matter more. If an overnight lead won’t be contacted for hours and that delay materially lowers its value, an ad schedule may reflect a legitimate operational constraint. If leads submitted overnight convert just as well once contacted, however, shutting those hours off may simply reduce opportunity.</p>



<h3 id="h-ecommerce" class="wp-block-heading">Ecommerce</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Customers can purchase around the clock, so business hours alone are rarely a strong reason to restrict delivery. Look for sustained differences in conversion value and profitability before excluding hours rather than assuming overnight traffic is inherently less valuable.</p>



<h3 id="h-b2b-and-appointment-based-businesses" class="wp-block-heading">B2B and appointment-based businesses</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Don’t assume prospects only search during office hours. B2B research can happen at night and still produce qualified leads the next day. Appointment-based businesses have a different concern: available capacity. If additional leads lose value because appointments are already full, the business may have a legitimate reason to limit acquisition.</p>



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<h2 id="h-when-dayparting-still-makes-sense" class="wp-block-heading">When dayparting still makes sense</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Across industries, legitimate reasons for restricting delivery tend to fall into a few categories.</p>



<h3 id="h-operating-constraints" class="wp-block-heading">Operating constraints</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If a time-sensitive phone lead has little value after 6 p.m. because nobody can respond until the next day, limiting those hours may make sense.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But being closed isn’t enough on its own. If someone can submit a form at 9 p.m. and become a perfectly good customer when the sales team follows up the next morning, there may be no reason to stop advertising.</p>



<h3 id="h-capacity" class="wp-block-heading">Capacity</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If a business can only fulfill a fixed number of jobs or appointments and additional leads have sharply reduced value once that capacity is reached, the advertiser has information Smart Bidding doesn’t inherently know.</p>



<h3 id="h-contractual-licensing-legal-or-internal-compliance-requirements" class="wp-block-heading">Contractual, licensing, legal, or internal compliance requirements</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If a campaign genuinely cannot advertise during certain periods, scheduling becomes an eligibility requirement rather than a performance optimization.</p>



<h3 id="h-budget-constraints" class="wp-block-heading">Budget constraints</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">This requires more caution. If a campaign consistently spends heavily early and misses later demand, restricting eligibility may be one option, but it shouldn’t be the first reaction.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Check whether the budget is appropriate, whether CPA or ROAS targets are realistic, and whether conversion quality changes throughout the day before using a schedule to control spend.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A useful question before adding any restriction is:&nbsp;</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Do I know something about the business that the bidding system cannot see in the auction?</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If the answer is yes, human intervention may be warranted. If the answer is simply that one hour looks bad in a report, investigate further before removing it.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper:</em></strong><a href="https://searchengineland.com/4-times-ppc-automation-still-needs-a-human-touch-464245"><strong><em> </em></strong><strong><em>4 times PPC automation still needs a human touch</em></strong></a>



<h2 id="h-google-s-2026-pacing-change-affects-scheduled-campaigns" class="wp-block-heading">Google’s 2026 pacing change affects scheduled campaigns</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Advertisers already using ad schedules have another reason to audit them.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Starting June 1, 2026, Google changed how budgets are paced for campaigns using ad schedules. Campaigns now pace toward the full monthly spending limit of 30.4 times the average daily budget, regardless of how many days the campaign is scheduled to run. Previously, pacing typically accounted for the number of active days.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A weekday-only campaign, for example, doesn’t automatically get a lower monthly pacing target because it is inactive on weekends. Google can concentrate more spend on eligible days while remaining within its daily and monthly spending limits.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Advertisers using restrictive schedules should revisit both the schedule and the budget. Check how much spend is being concentrated into active periods, whether CPA or ROAS has changed, and whether the original reason for restricting the campaign still exists.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If the schedule is necessary, keep it and adjust the budget strategy around the new pacing behavior. If nobody can explain why the schedule exists anymore, that’s a reason to test whether it still belongs there.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper:</em></strong><a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-changes-budget-pacing-rules-for-scheduled-campaigns-475107"><strong><em> </em></strong><strong><em>Google changes budget pacing rules for scheduled campaigns</em></strong></a>



<h2 id="h-check-the-account-time-zone-before-changing-anything" class="wp-block-heading">Check the account time zone before changing anything</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One final check can prevent an otherwise smart dayparting decision from going sideways.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google Ads schedules are <a href="https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6372656?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">based on the account’s time zone</a>, not each individual customer’s local time. If an account is set to Eastern time and the campaign targets customers across the United States, a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule does not represent 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for every customer.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">This matters for national accounts and campaigns that expanded geographically after the original account structure was created. It also matters when someone pulls an hour-of-day report and assumes the hour shown represents the customer’s local time.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Before changing an ad schedule, confirm the account time zone, identify the time zones covered by the campaign, and translate the proposed schedule accordingly.</p>


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<h2 id="h-stop-using-dayparting-as-a-reflex" class="wp-block-heading">Stop using dayparting as a reflex</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The next time someone points to four clicks at 2 a.m. and asks you to shut the hour off, don’t start with the schedule.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Check whether you have enough data. Account for conversion lag. Look at conversion quality and value. Confirm the account time zone. Determine whether there is an actual business constraint. If there isn’t one and the data is mature enough, test the restriction rather than assuming it will improve performance.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Smart Bidding already knows what time the auction is happening. Your job is to determine whether there is something about the business that makes that time unavailable or less valuable.</p>

Someone asks you to pull an hour-of-day report to identify the best-converting hours and limit wasted spend outside those hours. In many industries, especially news and publishing, you may see the 2 a.m. row, four clicks, and no conversions, and be asked to limit ad visibility during that hour.
Don’t do it. At least, not based on that report alone.
Dayparting’s role has changed. In a Smart Bidding account, Google is already evaluating time of day at auction time alongside signals that an hour-of-day report can’t show you. 
Manually excluding an hour doesn’t help Smart Bidding make a better decision during that period. It prevents the campaign from entering those auctions altogether.
Every campaign doesn’t need to run 24 hours a day. Advertisers need a better process for deciding when an ad schedule is actually warranted.
Smart Bidding already knows what time it is
Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, and Maximize Conversion Value all use auction-time bidding. Google lists time of day and day of week among the contextual signals Smart Bidding can use, along with signals such as device, location, and audience characteristics.
Google gives the example of a restaurant where bids may differ for someone searching at 8 p.m. on a Thursday, when people are more likely to make a weekend reservation, compared with someone searching at 8 a.m. on a Monday.
Smart Bidding isn’t looking at 8 p.m. and deciding that the entire hour is good or bad. It’s evaluating individual auctions that happen during that hour.
Google is also explicit about how ad schedules interact with Smart Bidding. Manual ad schedule bid adjustments, such as increasing bids 20% on Tuesday afternoons, aren’t used by Smart Bidding. The actual schedule is still respected.
If you remove Tuesday morning from the schedule, your campaign can’t enter those auctions. You aren’t telling Smart Bidding to be more conservative during that period. You’re removing the period from consideration entirely.
That makes dayparting less of a bidding tactic and more of an eligibility decision.
Dig deeper: When to trust Google Ads AI and when you shouldn’t



  
your competitors win.
      
Analyze your competitors
    
Before you exclude an hour, audit the data
Hour-of-day reporting is still useful. The problem comes when advertisers treat a weak row as enough evidence to change campaign eligibility. Before excluding an hour, I look at four things.
1. Get enough data before making the call
There are 168 hours in a week. Once you start slicing an account across individual hours, seemingly obvious trends can be based on little traffic.
Four clicks without a conversion tell you what happened to four clicks. It doesn’t tell you that 2 a.m. is inherently unprofitable.
Instead of reacting to a few days of data, expand the date range. In many accounts, reviewing at least 60 to 90 days gives you a better chance of distinguishing a persistent pattern from a short-term fluctuation. 
The right range still depends on account volume and conversion cycle. 
The goal isn’t to hit an arbitrary number of days. It’s to get enough data for the pattern to repeat.
2. Account for conversion lag
A click can happen now and convert hours or days later. Google Ads generally attributes conversions back to the date of the ad interaction, which means recent performance can look worse while conversions are still coming in.
Google recommends accounting for conversion delay when evaluating performance. Its documentation warns that recent periods can appear to have fewer conversions and a higher cost per conversion because spend has already been reported, while some conversions haven’t.
Before deciding Tuesday night is underperforming on Wednesday morning, check your typical conversion delay. If the data isn’t mature, neither is the conclusion.
3. Look beyond the hourly average
An hour with a poor average CPA can still contain valuable auctions. A manual schedule has no way to distinguish between them. Smart Bidding does.
Before excluding a time period, look beyond conversions and CPA. Consider conversion value, lead quality, downstream sales data, and the actual business value of the customers acquired during that period.
4. Test the restriction instead of assuming it works
If there’s enough volume to test, test.
I saw this firsthand while managing a restaurant account. We tested restricting delivery to selected hours against allowing the campaign to remain eligible 24 hours a day. The unrestricted approach increased conversions by 12% while decreasing CPA by 3%.
The test showed that the hourly report alone hadn’t captured the value of the auctions we were removing.
If you have enough traffic, compare the scheduled approach against broader eligibility and measure the result against the KPI that actually matters to the business. Don’t assume fewer hours automatically means less waste.
How dayparting changes by industry
The case for dayparting also depends on what happens after someone clicks. A schedule that makes sense for a call-driven business may unnecessarily restrict an account that can convert customers around the clock.
News and publishing
Reader demand doesn’t follow office hours. Breaking news, elections, sports, and major entertainment events can create traffic outside historically strong periods. A rigid schedule built from historical hourly averages can leave a campaign sitting out when demand suddenly changes.
Restaurants
Searches and reservations can happen long after the dinner rush or before the restaurant opens. The restaurant test above is a good example of why operating hours and conversion hours shouldn’t automatically be treated as the same thing.
Home services and lead generation
Response time can matter more. If an overnight lead won’t be contacted for hours and that delay materially lowers its value, an ad schedule may reflect a legitimate operational constraint. If leads submitted overnight convert just as well once contacted, however, shutting those hours off may simply reduce opportunity.
Ecommerce
Customers can purchase around the clock, so business hours alone are rarely a strong reason to restrict delivery. Look for sustained differences in conversion value and profitability before excluding hours rather than assuming overnight traffic is inherently less valuable.
B2B and appointment-based businesses
Don’t assume prospects only search during office hours. B2B research can happen at night and still produce qualified leads the next day. Appointment-based businesses have a different concern: available capacity. If additional leads lose value because appointments are already full, the business may have a legitimate reason to limit acquisition.
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
When dayparting still makes sense
Across industries, legitimate reasons for restricting delivery tend to fall into a few categories.
Operating constraints
If a time-sensitive phone lead has little value after 6 p.m. because nobody can respond until the next day, limiting those hours may make sense. 
But being closed isn’t enough on its own. If someone can submit a form at 9 p.m. and become a perfectly good customer when the sales team follows up the next morning, there may be no reason to stop advertising.
Capacity
If a business can only fulfill a fixed number of jobs or appointments and additional leads have sharply reduced value once that capacity is reached, the advertiser has information Smart Bidding doesn’t inherently know.
Contractual, licensing, legal, or internal compliance requirements
If a campaign genuinely cannot advertise during certain periods, scheduling becomes an eligibility requirement rather than a performance optimization.
Budget constraints
This requires more caution. If a campaign consistently spends heavily early and misses later demand, restricting eligibility may be one option, but it shouldn’t be the first reaction. 
Check whether the budget is appropriate, whether CPA or ROAS targets are realistic, and whether conversion quality changes throughout the day before using a schedule to control spend.
A useful question before adding any restriction is: 
Do I know something about the business that the bidding system cannot see in the auction?
If the answer is yes, human intervention may be warranted. If the answer is simply that one hour looks bad in a report, investigate further before removing it.
Dig deeper: 4 times PPC automation still needs a human touch



Google’s 2026 pacing change affects scheduled campaigns
Advertisers already using ad schedules have another reason to audit them.
Starting June 1, 2026, Google changed how budgets are paced for campaigns using ad schedules. Campaigns now pace toward the full monthly spending limit of 30.4 times the average daily budget, regardless of how many days the campaign is scheduled to run. Previously, pacing typically accounted for the number of active days.
A weekday-only campaign, for example, doesn’t automatically get a lower monthly pacing target because it is inactive on weekends. Google can concentrate more spend on eligible days while remaining within its daily and monthly spending limits.
Advertisers using restrictive schedules should revisit both the schedule and the budget. Check how much spend is being concentrated into active periods, whether CPA or ROAS has changed, and whether the original reason for restricting the campaign still exists.
If the schedule is necessary, keep it and adjust the budget strategy around the new pacing behavior. If nobody can explain why the schedule exists anymore, that’s a reason to test whether it still belongs there.
Dig deeper: Google changes budget pacing rules for scheduled campaigns



Check the account time zone before changing anything
One final check can prevent an otherwise smart dayparting decision from going sideways.
Google Ads schedules are based on the account’s time zone, not each individual customer’s local time. If an account is set to Eastern time and the campaign targets customers across the United States, a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule does not represent 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for every customer.
This matters for national accounts and campaigns that expanded geographically after the original account structure was created. It also matters when someone pulls an hour-of-day report and assumes the hour shown represents the customer’s local time.
Before changing an ad schedule, confirm the account time zone, identify the time zones covered by the campaign, and translate the proposed schedule accordingly.
a customer you lose.
      
See who’s stealing your traffic
    
Stop using dayparting as a reflex
The next time someone points to four clicks at 2 a.m. and asks you to shut the hour off, don’t start with the schedule.
Check whether you have enough data. Account for conversion lag. Look at conversion quality and value. Confirm the account time zone. Determine whether there is an actual business constraint. If there isn’t one and the data is mature enough, test the restriction rather than assuming it will improve performance.
Smart Bidding already knows what time the auction is happening. Your job is to determine whether there is something about the business that makes that time unavailable or less valuable.

Smart Bidding sees the auction-level signals your hourly report can’t. Know what you’re giving up when you cut an hour.

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