Forbes spent $72.2 million on paid search in July 2026. The New York Times spent $11.3 million. Across the top 100 media publishers tracked, that's $113 million in one month, up 274% over three years.
AI Overviews traffic loss is why. Publishers are now paying for the clicks their own SEO used to earn for free. That should worry anyone whose marketing plan still ends at "rank on page one."
What's Behind the AI Overviews Traffic Loss#
Adweek reported on 9 September the organic side of this trade, publisher by publisher:
- Forbes organic search traffic: down 26.7% year over year
- CNN organic search traffic: down 28.9% year over year
- USA Today organic search traffic: down 24.1% year over year
- Forbes paid search spend: up 8x over three years
Similarweb's David Carr told the outlet the pay-per-click surge started "basically since April." Separately, research cited by PPC Land puts AI-generated answers at 97-100% of Google's People Also Ask box as of early September, drawn from a 19.2-million-query dataset.
The blue links are still there. Almost nobody scrolls to them.
Does This Change Anything If You're Not a Media Publisher?#
If organic search sends you a few hundred visits a month, not much changes today — keep writing, keep optimizing, move on. If content or SEO actually drives pipeline for you — leads, bookings, demo requests — this changes what a page-one ranking is worth, because the businesses that wrote the book on organic distribution just admitted it isn't enough on its own.
At WebEpex we pulled this into every SEO client conversation this week, because most of our clients — D2C brands and SaaS founders across GCC, Europe, USA, Canada, and Indian SMBs — are a smaller version of the exact problem Forbes just spent eight figures fixing.
Here's the split we'd draw. A page ranking for a broad, informational term was already worth less than it used to be; that traffic was thin on intent anyway. A page ranking for something a buyer types right before they're ready to pay is worth defending hard, with paid search as backup rather than the whole plan.
The Honest Trade-offs#
Buying back search traffic works. It's also survivorship bait.
It works because these publishers already have the audience data, ad inventory, and cash flow to make PPC math pencil out at scale. Most small businesses don't have Forbes' margins to burn on defensive ad spend.
It's also not free of risk. Paid traffic that used to be organic is now a cost center with no floor, and nobody in either article says when that spend levels off.
My read: this is a symptom of a bigger shift, not a fix. AI answer engines are the new front door, and buying Google traffic doesn't get you cited inside Gemini or ChatGPT's answer.
How We're Handling It#
We've already rebuilt client content briefs this month to score every target keyword on two axes, not one: can it still rank, and does it survive being summarized without a click. Terms that fail the second test get folded into a paid search test or reworked toward the structured, citable format we laid out in our answer engine optimization piece.
We also pulled AI-referral and PAA-visibility tracking into the same dashboards we already use for Search Console's new AI reporting, so a client sees organic rank, AI citation, and paid spend on one screen instead of three.
Took us longer than it should have to admit that raw rank position wasn't the number that mattered anymore, especially with rank trackers already getting noisier this month. We were still leading client reports with it into August.
What I'd Tell a Client This Week#
Pull your last 90 days of organic sessions by landing page. Check which pages actually convert, not which ones rank.
If a converting page's traffic dropped double digits, test a small paid search budget against that exact query before you touch the content. If it's an informational page with no commercial intent, I wouldn't spend a rupee or a dirham defending its ranking — let it go.
Doing nothing this week is a fine answer too, if none of this moved for you.
If you want a straight read on whether this actually touches your traffic, send me your Search Console export and I'll tell you in a couple of minutes, no pitch attached. cal.com/webepex/growth-review
