The CBC ran a piece this week about what AI summaries are doing to the people who make things for the web.
The example that stuck with me was Deb Perelman. She’s run the food blog Smitten Kitchen for twenty years. Now chunks of her own recipes appear in the AI summary above the search results, published without her permission, and nobody has to visit her to read them.
Cloudflare’s own report is blunter than the coverage of it. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic fell across every major industry by at least 35 per cent. The most heavily crawled categories lost as much as 40 per cent in under a year. More than half of all internet traffic is now non-human. And the share of crawler requests made for AI training, not indexing, went from 22 per cent in spring 2025 to 52 per cent by June 2026.
One number in there explains who holds the power. Google accounts for roughly 88 per cent of referral traffic. Whatever arrangement exists between websites and search, it’s effectively an arrangement with one company.
I spent thirty-three years in enterprise IT, twenty of them as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, before I started writing full time. So when an article tells me a number has moved, my instinct is to go and measure the thing myself instead of taking the reported figure. This week I did, on my own site, and what I found was worse and more interesting than the article suggests.
What happens when you count properly
My site has been reporting between 400 and 1,800 visits a day and I could never explain the variation. A post that landed well and a post nobody read produced numbers I couldn’t tell apart.
My site has been reporting between 400 and 1,800 visits a day and I could never explain the variation.Share on X
This week I put proper filtering in front of it. Not the usual exclusion of things that politely announce themselves as robots. Blocking traffic arriving from data centers. Azure, AWS, OVH, Hetzner, Linode, Alibaba, and a dozen more. Real readers don’t browse from a rented virtual machine in Frankfurt. They arrive from Comcast, from Verizon, from a phone on a train.
Roughly a third of what I had been counting came from one cloud provider’s address ranges. Another slice was my own site-crawling script. That uses an ordinary browser identity and had been inflating my figures for months. What remained was about half of what I thought I had.
Cloudflare’s own continental measurement puts it more starkly than my site does. Across North America, 70.5 per cent of requests for HTML content are machines. Fewer than three in ten are people.
Why don’t website traffic numbers mean much now?
I keep thinking about a shop. A shop counts people through the door because footfall used to correlate with sales. If a hundred people came in, some bought something, and the ratio held steady enough to plan around.
Now imagine seven in ten of those people are photographing your shelves. The pictures go into a catalog you’ll never see, published by someone who will never mention where they came from. Your footfall counter still works perfectly. It counts every single one of them. The number it produces has simply stopped having any relationship to whether you sold anything.
That’s a website in 2026. The counter is fine. What it counts changed underneath it. And the machines are how most people will encounter your work from now on, because they read it, summarize it, and hand the summary to someone who never arrives.
Is writing for the web finished?
No, and the doom version of this argument is as unhelpful as pretending nothing has changed. What broke is one arrangement. You write something. A search engine finds it. The search engine sends you a reader. Some fraction of those readers become money. That deal held for twenty-five years and a lot of businesses assumed it was permanent.
It was a distribution agreement with a company that owed you nothing, and it lasted exactly as long as sending you the reader served their purposes.
Mozilla’s president, Mark Surman, puts the worry clearly. If the incentive to make original independent work disappears, what’s left comes from large companies, from governments, or from the AI itself. That’s a real risk. But the response is to stop building on somebody else’s distribution.
What should you measure instead of website traffic?
Citation replaces the visit. When somebody asks an assistant about ghostwriting contracts, or book structure, or whether their story is worth telling, the answer gets assembled from sources. Being one of those sources is now the equivalent of ranking, and it doesn’t produce a visit you can count. It produces a mention you mostly can’t see.
That sounds like a downgrade until you notice what it rewards. A search engine ranked pages. An answering system cites entities, and wants to know who you are and whether anything outside your own website confirms it.
Which is why the work I’ve been doing for the last year stopped being housekeeping and became the actual strategy. A Wikidata entry. Structured data that says the same thing on every page. Author identifiers that tie the writing to a person. The same figures repeated in the same form everywhere a machine might look. None of that was worth much when search was sending readers, and all of it matters now that machines are doing the reading.
The book on this: The Day Your Website Died is forty-two chapters on how answer engines decide who gets named, and what to do about it.
One marketer quoted in the CBC piece describes adding considerable text to the About page. People won’t read all of it, he says plainly, and the AI definitely will. He’s right, and a year ago that would have sounded absurd.
What this changes for someone writing a book
Counterintuitively, it makes the book worth more than it was a year ago.
A blog post is a claim on a page.
A published book is a durable, citable artifact with an ISBN, a publication date, a named author and a record in library systems that no algorithm change deletes. When an AI system is deciding whether somebody knows what they’re talking about, a book is one of the strongest signals available. It keeps working whether or not anyone visits your website.
I’ve written 113+ books under my own name and ghostwritten 54+ more for other people. The ghostwritten ones taught me that those books work for their authors regardless of whether those authors have a website at all. The book is the asset. The site was always the shop window. So the person most exposed to what is happening is the business that spent a decade building an audience on rented land. First Google’s, then a platform’s. Both landlords have stopped forwarding the post.
What I would do about it
Four things, in the order I’d do them.
Find out what your traffic really is. Not your analytics number. That counts whatever reaches it. Filter out data center traffic and check your raw logs against your dashboard for a few days. You won’t enjoy the answer and you need it, because every decision downstream depends on knowing which half was real.
Fix your identity before your content. Consistent facts about who you are, in structured form, everywhere a machine reads. Same name, same credentials, same numbers. This is dull work and it’s the single most useful thing available right now.
Build the direct relationship. A mailing list, a podcast, a book in someone’s hands. Anything where the connection doesn’t pass through an intermediary who can decide tomorrow to stop passing it on. This is the same argument I make to clients about tooling, for the same reason: own the part you can’t afford to lose.
Write the thing only you can write. A summary can replace an article that assembled public information. It can’t replace the eleven years you spent inside an industry, or the decision you made when payroll was uncertain. Whether your story is worth telling was never a question about search traffic, and the answer hasn’t changed.
The choice Google is offering, and why it is not one
This part deserves more attention than it gets.
Google uses a single crawler to index your site for search and to collect material for training and for the AI Overview that answers the question without sending anyone to you.
One crawler, two purposes, one switch. So a publisher who doesn’t want their work summarized has exactly one lever available, and pulling it removes them from search entirely. Keep the arrangement that no longer sends readers, or leave the index that 88 per cent of referral traffic flows through.
That’s the shape of a choice, offered by the only party with anything to lose from you making it.
The UK is the exception, and it’s worth watching. In June 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority required Google to give publishers a way out of AI Overview without being deindexed. Google is trialling exactly that, with a promise that using the control won’t affect ordinary search rankings. Which is an admission that separating the two was always possible and simply never offered.
Is anyone going to fix the economics?
Possibly, and the shape of it is already visible.
Wikipedia is the interesting case. Lane Becker runs Wikimedia Enterprise.
He describes a single bot pulling fifty articles in under a second, and wanting every page in every language inside half an hour. That costs real money in servers, for content that’s free to read. Wikimedia now sells bulk access to Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, turning the scraping problem into a revenue line.
At the other end, publishers are considering the nuclear option.
The CEO of USA Today said the traditional Google search business model is dead and signalled a willingness to block Google outright. Reddit and others are reportedly weighing the same thing. Cloudflare is moving too, and from September 15 it starts blocking multi-purpose crawlers by default unless site owners opt out.
A settlement will come out of that, and it’ll probably look more like licensing than like the free-crawl arrangement we’ve had. What it won’t do is restore the referral traffic. That’s gone regardless of how the payment question resolves. What makes me angry is who gets left out of that settlement. The big publishers will get licensing deals. The food blogger with twenty years of recipes, the solo consultant and the small shop won’t get a seat at that table, and they’re the people who made the web worth scraping in the first place.
The counter still works
I spent today deliberately making my own traffic numbers smaller, and it felt wrong the entire time. Years of watching a number go up, and I sat there removing most of it on purpose.
But the shop analogy holds all the way through. I wasn’t losing customers. I was switching off a counter that had been including everyone who came in to photograph the shelves, and finding out how many people had been buying. That number is much smaller and it’s the first one I’ve had in years that means anything.
The web is being rebuilt for machines. Human attention didn’t disappear, it moved somewhere that doesn’t produce a visit you can count. So count something else, and put your work where being read by a machine still leads back to you. If you want the detail on how that side works, the writing hub collects the pieces on entity, structure and authorship, and my ghostwriting service page explains how I build a book from what you already know.
The counter still works, and I’m done letting it tell me how my business is doing. Anybody still reporting raw visits to a boss or a client is handing over a number that’s half machines or worse, and they ought to stop before somebody makes a decision based on it.
