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How Much Traffic Did a Number One Google Site Lose?
Nathan Gotch says a media website he audited lost 46% of its traffic since 2023 while ranking number one in Google for every keyword the site cared about. Traffic kept plummeting even though the site ranked number one for everything.
The site was doing the technical work correctly and still getting destroyed because artificial intelligence was eating the clicks. Zero-click search, the pattern Rand Fishkin talks about, is a reality for topics with informational intent, and the media site was targeting that kind of topic.
A number one Google ranking no longer brings the old flow of visits when an artificial intelligence answer satisfies an informational search before a click.
SmashNotes wrote this summary.