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- Not okay, Google: search engine traffic decreased by a quarter in 2025
Not okay, Google: search engine traffic decreased by a quarter in 2025
By the second half of 2025, there was a trend for users to switch from traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Bing to AI tools. Their main advantage is the ability to quickly find, process and transmit the necessary information without having to scroll through the output lists. The drop in traffic, according to various estimates, was about 25%. At the same time, the main "blow" fell on topics related to science, education and health. What solutions are gradually being replaced by search engines and whether the trend will continue to gain momentum is in the Izvestia article.
Where does the traffic flow from search engines?
Referral traffic, that is, the number of user clicks on links on third-party resources, worldwide fell by up to 25% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year, according to estimates from the non-profit international analytical company Digital Content Next (DCN, the results of the study are available from Izvestia). The biggest "blow" fell on topics related to science, education and health.
In 2025, users began to visit news sites less frequently — traffic dropped from 2.3 billion to 1.7 billion clicks compared to 2024, the document says. At the same time, more and more requests end without going to the sites — 69% have become such, compared with 56% a year ago.
This confirms the trend of so-called click-free search. At the same time, interest in ChatGPT has multiplied — the number of news requests to it has increased by 212%, and the total number of visits over the year has amounted to 47 billion. Also, for the first time in nine years, Google's market share decreased slightly to 89.7%, the authors added.
All this suggests that people are using regular search engines less and less often and are turning to AI assistants more often, said Stanislav Yezhov, director of AI at the Astra Group.
— Areas that have traditionally depended on search traffic are facing a decrease in the number of clicks on websites. This is most clearly seen in the example of news queries: here the traffic drop was about 40%. Information requests (the second most important group) lost about 25% of traffic over the year. The main reason is the shift in user scenarios towards receiving structured, instant responses from AI assistants integrated directly into search engines, which reduces the number of clicks on links, but does not reduce the total number of requests. Thus, the very essence and vector of the search industry's development are changing," explained Oleg Elmanov, CEO of Fusion IT integrator.
The number of requests and clicks made by users using AI is growing by an average of 35-40% per year. This trend is particularly noticeable in high—tech industries such as fintech, logistics, and enterprise solution development. Global statistics confirm the sustainability of the trend: in 2024-2025, the volume of AI traffic increased by about 10 times, and conversions from AI traffic turned out to be almost twice as high as in classical search, said Ekaterina Dorofeeva, Product Director of Digital Habits Group.
The Minervasoft AI learning integrator company expects that the usual search bar will eventually disappear, and an assistant with a human-like interface will provide answers to questions. At the same time, as Alexey Zobnin, the co-founder of the organization, clarified, due to "hallucinations" (erroneous information generated by AI), the accuracy of artificial intelligence responses still raises questions.
Between January 2024 and May 2025, ChatGPT traffic increased 25-fold. Mostly to news sites. At the same time, in Russia, click-through rates (CTR) decreased from 7% to 4% due to AI assistants, explained Maxim Alekseev, CEO of the Discourse Group communications agency.
— The reality in the digital space is rapidly changing, and it is probably especially important for the professional community to keep its finger on the pulse, — says Daniil Arzhakov, an information technology specialist.
The expert noted that the dominance of chatbots for search will have to make adjustments to the system that has developed over the years. At the same time, he recalled that in September 2025, the American corporation Google was fined in the European Union for almost €3 billion ($3.5 billion) for abusing its dominant position and providing a competitive advantage to its advertising platforms.
Unlike Western competitors, Yandex records a simultaneous increase in both the use of traditional search and interest in the Alice neural network — they turn to it for help in solving new, additional tasks. At the same time, the total number of requests is growing: in the second quarter, this figure increased by 9.8% year—on-year, which is a record increase over the past six quarters, the company's press service reported.
— Since the appearance of AI answers in the search in October 2024, their daily audience has exceeded 13 million users. In total, more than 80 million people interacted with such responses. At the same time, the percentage of traffic from Alice's responses to information source sites remains unchanged. A recent survey showed that 91% of respondents found it easier to find information on the Internet thanks to AI answers, and 90% added that they use them to get answers to questions faster than if they searched for them on their own, the company said.
Unlike Google, Yandex products do not create competition for each other, so there is no substitution of one IT solution for another, experts say. In their opinion, this is due to the lack of such large-scale projects as AI tools in the Google search engine.
Smart technology development
— The decline in search engine traffic will stop largely due to the neural network responses that are beginning to be provided in queries. However, this can have a negative impact on information sites that people do not go to when they are conceived, because they receive their answer immediately in the search results. This affects the amount of ads shown on these resources. As a result, monetization is falling," explained Dmitry Fedoseev, Managing Director of Hybrid Russia.
With the advent of chatbots, 80% of users have found an easier way to receive information in the form of ready-made help, eliminating even the basic need to independently compose a coherent and readable text from the results. It is this group that now makes up the bulk of the fans of such bots, because their difficulties in formulating thoughts significantly exceed the need and ability to critically analyze the data they receive. The remaining 20% continue to use search engines, says Dmitry Parshin, Executive director of ALMI Partner.
— According to Apple, for the first time in 22 years, Google's search traffic in Safari decreased, which is attributed to the growing popularity of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. The growth rate of neural networks is higher than that of traditional search engines. They even learned how to generate referral traffic by adding useful links to their results. However, the overall market share is still small. Perplexity recently launched the Comet AI browser, which can also influence the growth rate of modern AI solutions," said Alexander Perevalov, head of the GreenData artificial intelligence development group.
At the same time, many search engines, such as Google, have begun to integrate the so—called AI Overview, which is the generation of a summary of the essence of a query based on sites from classic search results, he added.
The total traffic of the top 10 chatbots has grown by about 80%, it is estimated at 55 billion visits — this is impressive data, says Ilya Fomichev, head of AI at SimbirSoft. Nevertheless, according to him, one should not expect a full consolidation of the leadership of chatbots in this race. However, the forecast is quite likely within 5-6 years.
Neural networks cannot replace a search engine in all cases. System developers will have to take into account the advantages of chatbots, make changes to the logic of their search results, algorithms, display and accounting of advertising, but by and large everyone will benefit from this, both users, search engines, and even chatbots, says Anna Vlasova, head of Computational Linguistics at Nanosemantics Group.
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