Welcome to our January Digital Digest!
We’re back with our first Digital Digest of the year, but before we look ahead, we’re taking a look around at all the January headlines you might have missed.
Traditional Search Remains In Top Place
Has traditional search declined by 25%, as predicted?
Just under two years ago, Gartner predicted that there would be a 25% decline in the number of ‘traditional’ searches made by 2026. We explored this prediction last year in our July Digital Digest and we wondered then whether it would prove to be true …
So now, almost a whole month into 2026, has this steep decline become a reality? Let us examine the facts: traditional search engines are now competing with AI-powered chatbots that, between April 2024 and March 2025, saw an 80.92% increase in visits. However, these 55.2 billion visits equate to just 2.96% of the visits that the 10 most used search engines received during this same period, and the total decline in traffic across all these engines was less than 1%.
These stats lead us to conclude that, unless traffic amongst all traditional search engines was in an unprecedented freefall during the final 9 months of the year, they have defied Gartner’s prediction. We believe that organic search is experiencing less of a decline and more of a gradual redistribution, likely driven by zero-click searches, and the traditional modes of search remain far from irrelevant.
Organic vs AI Referrals
Organic search, not AI, is still delivering the majority of traffic to your website.
AI search is indisputably on the rise. Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and DeepSeek all received over 1 billion visits last year, whilst ChatGPT topped them all with 47.7 billion, but despite achieving double-digit monthly growth rates, AI search still only accounts for less than 1% of referral traffic.
As we have already touched on, search engine traffic has remained largely stable, with a YoY decline of only 0.51% from 2024 to 2025. Last year, Google alone saw 26x more daily traffic than the most popular AI chatbot (ChatGPT), and sent 345x more traffic to websites than the top 3 AI models combined. This, coupled with the fact that only 8% of AI Overviews result in a click, shows that AI search referrals are in no position to be replacing clicks achieved through traditional SEO.
However, whilst delivering only 0.5% of overall traffic, AI search is able to convert visitors 23x better than organic search. Whilst organic search is used for research and information-gathering, more and more users are turning to AI search further along the customer journey. This is also when they are most likely to take action; whether this is to gather recommendations, compare options, or make a conversion.
AI Overviews Present A Risk To Health
“Completely wrong” information has been found in AI Overviews for health-related searches.
We all know that AI Overviews, by their own admission, “can and will make mistakes” – but what happens when this starts having real-world consequences?
Earlier this month, a Guardian investigation found that false or misleading health information has been found in Google’s AI Overviews. The summaries, which were independently reviewed by health specialists, delivered inaccurate results on a range of topics from pancreatic and vaginal cancer, to mental health conditions and eating disorders.
Since the investigation, Google has reiterated its commitment to take action whenever inaccurate Overviews are identified, but concerns remain that the same questions, asked in a different way, may still produce misleading Overviews for those seeking health advice online.
Google Launches Personalised Shopping Ads
Google aims to expand its AI-powered shopping experience with personalised ads.
Google plans to move away from its search ads model, and towards AI-powered shopping experiences, with the introduction of personalised ads within AI Mode. Advertisers will soon be able to offer exclusive deals, which are specific to each user and based upon their conversations with the AI, directly to shoppers who are ready to make a purchase.
By embedding these ads into AI Mode’s interface, Google aims to deliver better value options to shoppers and help retailers to secure online sales, all within one chat. This is not the first time an AI platform has delivered integrated shopping features (as we touched on in our October Digital Digest), but these in-chat offers signal a shift in agentic commerce and digital advertising.
By appearing directly in conversations, integrated ads may soon become the key deciding factor for a purchase, particularly if a shopper is able to research options, gather discounts, and even click ‘buy now’ without needing to visit external websites.
The New Age of News
As AI media sweeps the world, Google search traffic to hundreds of news sites has dipped.
In a world where anyone can produce (and say) anything, misinformation, AI deep-fakes, and the potential for large-scale deception are just some of the challenges facing traditional news outlets in 2026.
As young people lose interest in traditional media, social media platforms flood with unverified content, and efforts to undermine legitimate journalism as ‘fake news’ increase, the AI era is changing the way people access information online. Global search traffic to news sites fell by an entire third between November 2024 and November 2025, and of the 280 media leaders who were surveyed, a fifth expect to lose over 75% of their search traffic in the coming years.
AI Overviews and AI chatbots provide citations for users to access the original source of information (which Google Search Help encourages them to do) but despite this, zero-click searches have still become the new norm. Referrals are diminishing year-on-year by 21% for Google Discover and 33% for Google Search, motivating news platforms to shift towards a more direct relationship with their audience that does not rely upon third-party referrals.
The Digital Digest
Come back next month as we cut through the noise once again with a brand new Digest, written and researched by our team.
You can also reach out to us at any point in the meantime, to discuss what these developments mean for your marketing strategy, and what we can do to help.
