Google Keeps the Visit Now. Strategy for a Zero-Click World

On October 29, 2026, Reddit told its shareholders something every company that lives on search traffic has been dreading. “Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter,” its letter said. October was worse: “search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week.” If that went on, the company warned, its daily users could fall in Q4 “by a low-double-digit percentage” from about 130 million.

The next day Reddit’s shares fell 29%, their worst day since the company went public in 2024. That is the market’s business, not ours. Ours is the question underneath it, and it applies to every company that finds customers through search.

That AI answers take clicks from the websites they summarize is not news. Anyone who has used Google lately has seen the answer appear above the links. The more useful questions are what the companies that have lived with it longest are doing about it, and where the money in search is going instead. Their filings answer both, and the answer is not to fight for the click.

Here is where we stand, and why.

We searched every annual report, quarterly report and earnings release filed with the SEC since January 2023 for the language of AI in search: AI Overviews, zero-click, answer engines and their cousins. Then we kept only the sentences that also talk about traffic.

The count went from 7 companies in 2024 to 24 in 2025 and 52 in the first ten months of 2026. Most still hedge: in 2026, 21 of the 52 only warn that it may hurt them. But 8 now say it already has.

Their sentences are blunt. Chegg, the homework help company, lost 40% of its subscribers in a year “as we continue to feel the impact of lower traffic, largely due to Google AI Overviews.” People Inc, the publisher behind PEOPLE, reported a 22% decline in its core sessions in the second quarter of 2026, “due primarily to the impact of the increasing prominence of Google AI Overviews on Google search sessions.” LegalZoom says the shift toward zero-click searches “has contributed, and may continue to contribute, to reduced organic traffic, increased customer acquisition costs” and weaker search marketing.

Now look at the other side of the search page. Every quarter Alphabet reports two numbers that, side by side, tell a story. One is paid clicks: clicks on the ads Google shows on its own search pages and properties. The other is impressions on the Google Network: the ads Google places on other companies’ websites and apps.

Paid clicks have grown in every year since 2023, and by 13%, 13% and 8% from a year earlier in the first three quarters of 2026. Network impressions have fallen in every year over the same stretch, and by 14% in the third quarter of 2026.

Alphabet does not say AI answers caused either trend, and both have many causes. But together they describe a toll road. More of the attention search creates stays on Google’s own pages, where Google sells it. Less of it flows out to the rest of the web, where everyone else used to earn from it. For a business that used to get the click for free, the choice is to buy it back as an ad or to do without it. LegalZoom’s higher customer acquisition costs are what buying it back looks like.

If the story ended there, it would be a story about decline. People Inc’s numbers say it does not have to end there. In the first quarter of 2024, Google search sent it 1,245 million sessions, 55% of its core sessions. Two years later it sent 463 million, 25%. That is the 63% decline in Google search referrals the company reports “over two years.”

Over the same two years its quarterly digital revenue rose from $221 million to $253 million. Two things carried it. Revenue from the sessions it still had held flat, at $149 million and then $150 million, on 19% fewer sessions: about 24% more revenue per session, by our arithmetic. And revenue that does not depend on sessions at all, from AI licensing, apps, social platforms, events and commerce, grew 43%, to 41% of the total. Views of its content away from its own sites roughly doubled, from 10,192 million to 20,962 million.

AI Overviews now appear on nearly 70% of the company’s top search queries, by its own count. It stopped treating the Google visit as the business, and the business grew.

Reddit’s quarter, under the headline, says something similar. Its daily users in the United States fell 2% from a year earlier and 5% from the quarter before. Yet its revenue per daily user rose 36%, to $6.87, mainly on higher ad prices.

Its answer to the search decline is to stop serving strangers. Visitors who arrive from search engines, its quarterly report notes, “are generally not logged in.” The company is now “shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience,” because, its letter says, “we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally.”

Other companies are finding the same thing from other directions. TechTarget, which sells to technology buyers, reports “a 2x to 3x higher membership conversion rate from answer engine and LLM citations compared to traditional organic search”: the people who come through AI answers arrive readier to sign up. Etsy says clicks from its own email and push messages rose more than 25% in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Three deserve an answer.

First, walls cost visitors. Reddit says so itself: its experiments with requiring a login “could have adverse impacts on our business.” Some people who arrive from search will leave rather than sign up. That is fair, and it is why we would not copy Reddit’s move wholesale. The point is not the wall. It is knowing who your visitors are, and a wall is only one way to get there.

Second, People Inc is one company, with famous brands and content that AI companies will pay to license. A small business cannot replace search with licensing deals and Apple News. Also true. But the idea scales down: a mailing list, a customer account, a reason to come back directly. Etsy is not a publisher, and its own channels grew.

Third, the ads Google places on other sites could be falling for reasons that have nothing to do with AI answers, and Alphabet does not say. That is why we will keep watching that number rather than assume it, and why a turn in it would change our mind.