The Collapse of Organic Marketing—And What’s Next

The great content collapse is underway.

I’m going to give you some of the most jaw-dropping stats from a talk the CEO of Cloudflare gave recently — about how quickly visits and clicks are drying up to content publishers’ websites, and what it means for the future of marketing and growth.

Let’s get into this quick reaction video with some of the most incredible stats you’ll get this week on how quickly the entire shape of the internet is changing because of AI.

Okay, so this is a quick video from the CEO of Cloudflare, and I thought this was some of the most important data that’s been shared recently. So we’re going to get into it right here. I’m going to play some of the video and then stop it and narrate as we go along. Let’s listen to what he said.

The best metric that we found to describe how much harder your business — as a media creator, as a content creator — has gotten is to look at Google data. How many pages did Google scrape in exchange for how many visitors did they send?

I think that’s a good way to think about the value creation of the internet.

The way Google built its business with content publishers is this unspoken partnership: we scrape your content, and in return for scraping your content, we give you traffic back. That’s why all of this works.

So that visit-to-scrape ratio is a good way to think about how the internet actually works today.

Google is responsible for, I think, 63% to 67% of all referral traffic across the internet. So every website is somewhat reliant on Google website traffic — Google search traffic.

The trade with you is: you gave them your content, they took little snippets of it, described it, and in exchange they sent you traffic.

For every two pages they scraped, they sent you one visitor on average across the entire internet. We have really good data: they scraped two pieces of your content and they give you a visit back. That’s a pretty good partnership.

What has changed over that period of time — over the next 10 years, up until six months ago? We added two billion people to the internet. We went from four billion to six billion people using the internet.

That should be good for you as a content creator — two billion more people to read your content. So, wow, this should be good for all of us who create content. We should be getting many more visitors to our website.

The Google crawl rate has not changed at all. It’s been remarkably consistent over that entire time. And so, if you just had those two facts, you would think that for every scrape, you would have gotten more visitors.

But you all know that’s not what happened.

How much harder did it get over the last 10 years to be a publisher? I’ve asked that to a bunch of people and the answer is: “God, it’s about three times harder.” And that lines up exactly with the data.

So I think there are a couple quick points here.

Two billion more people have come onto the internet. Google is still crawling in the same way. So they’re crawling all of this data, but six months ago they would take six pages and give you a visit back.

So we have gone from two pages to one visit, to six months ago: six pages for one visit.

But wait until you hear what’s happening today.

Seventy-five percent — actually, not “today,” six months ago — 75% of queries to Google get answered on Google. Which means that if you were an original content creator, your information is getting summarized and then sold, because they still put ads there — but you don’t get the traffic anymore.

And that’s the good news. Because what’s happened in the last six months is that it has gotten even harder than it did over the previous 10 years.

The traffic ratio now is: for every 18 pages that Google takes from you, you get one visitor.

Pretty incredible when you think about it.

Seventy-five percent of all the questions people are asking Google get answered on their website, where they are able to monetize off ads. And the publishers who are creating all this content get nothing — nothing in return.

Now, they used to get visits. Keep that stat in your mind. They used to get one visit for every six pages scraped. It’s three times worse in six months.

And what changed? We can track this by region by region by region — and the answer is AI Overviews, where they’re taking your content and someone else’s content and someone else’s content, smashing it all together, and giving you an answer right there.

And I bet the answer today is that 90% of queries to Google get answered without people clicking on a single link. How incredible is that?

So we started 10 years ago: two pages for one visit. Up until about six months ago, it got three times worse: six pages were scraped and they give you a visit back. What has happened in the past six months is incredible.

We are now at the point where Google is giving you one visit for every 18 pages scraped because of AI Overviews. And we’re going to go from around 75% of questions being answered on Google to 90%.

So Google is basically monetizing other people’s content and taking the ability to monetize that content away from the publisher. That is not good for the future health of the web.

The way the web has been built is this value exchange: we create content, you give us visitors, and we can monetize some of those visitors. You can monetize some of that content. That is fundamentally how the internet has worked to date.

Now, that’s Google.

Where we are today is AI Overviews are being rolled out much more aggressively. I think over 35% of all searches trigger an AI Overview. Google is starting to demo or beta test AI Mode in the US and recently India. They say that’s going to be the default mode. So this is going to accelerate very rapidly.

But let’s get into some other data. How does this work for OpenAI? Because I think that’s something we all have an interest in.

OpenAI is becoming one of the de facto search engines when you want to use an AI assistant to search. So what does the data look like for OpenAI?

What’s the ratio for OpenAI six months ago? 250 to 1. What is it today? 1,500 to 1.

What’s changed? People trust the AI more over the last six months, which means they’re not reading original content. And so those three things go away.

Quick callout to myself here: as soon as I used ChatGPT — and you can go all the way back to the very first episode we covered in November after it launched — I literally said this would happen. Humans will always default to easy and fast, every single time.

I talked about the fact that eventually humans would become very comfortable using AI assistants to get answers. And a lot of the feedback I got was: I’m wrong. People would not trust AI. They would not query AI because they understand it hallucinates. They wouldn’t trust it. They would always default to the blue links.

I didn’t believe that, because the very first time I used ChatGPT, I could see it was going to be a much better experience than me having to go to the blue links and mine all this information myself.

And that is exactly what’s happening.

OpenAI was already tough enough: 250 pages scraped for one visit. Google has gotten pretty bad over the past six months, but that’s still around 18 pages scraped for one visit.

OpenAI: 250 pages scraped, they give you one visit.

What’s happening today? 1,500 pages scraped, one visit.

People are very comfortable getting their answers through an AI assistant because we’ve become used to that experience. We trust it more. We believe, “Hey, I’m sure it’s fine.” As long as it’s easier and faster, we default to that experience.

And that is fundamentally going to break the way the internet works today.

So if you believe that the business model of original content creation is driving visitors to that content, I have a really bad story for you: the future of the web is going to be more and more like AI.

That means people are going to be reading summaries of your content, not the original content.

And what I’m worried about — why I’m wearing black today — is: if you can’t sell subscriptions, you can’t sell ads, and you don’t get the ego hit from knowing people are consuming your stuff, why is anyone going to create content?

For someone who’s created content their entire time on the web — and has always enjoyed creating content — I think that’s a sad thing for all of us to consider as one potential outcome of AI.

It’s breaking the relationship between the publisher and the engines who rely on that content to monetize it — the aggregators. I do think that’s going to be problematic.

And it’s really problematic for marketers, because let’s admit it: most of the scalable marketing models we’ve built today — Google search has been at the heart of that.

But it’s not just that. Let’s actually play out what’s going to happen.

If you play out the last two years, it basically maps to what we said when we first experienced ChatGPT. So we have some history of being mostly right here.

What’s going to happen is search traffic is going to die out. People are going to gravitate towards AI assistants.

On those AI assistants, we’re going to look at share of voice — a brand metric. We’re going to look at how many impressions our brand got within those AI assistants, which is nowhere near as good as being able to track a click, a visit, a customer.

But it’s not just that. People still have to build scalable models somewhere — scalable, forecasted models. “If I do these things, I can equate that to 10, 20, 30 customers a month.”

So we’re going to gravitate much more toward paid advertising because we’re not able to do it organically.

Social platforms are locking down promotional content. If you use links or promotional content in your post, you usually get less engagement. They’re becoming closed walls.

Google is becoming a closed-world platform where they want to keep people on their platform. These AI assistants are closed walls — they want to keep you in their platform, and they do a great job of that.

So we gravitate toward paid advertising. The cost of paid advertising is going to go up and up and up, because there’s going to be more competition. That’s going to become uneconomical for a lot of businesses.

So how do we actually do that?

I think the way we market is going to drastically change, because the way you market is predicated on how platforms work, aggregators work, how the internet works, how consumer behavior works. You have to market into those things.

And those things are rapidly changing in a way we’ve never seen before — maybe since the internet itself started to become popular and we shifted from offline marketing to online marketing.

But we are going to rewrite the ways that we have done marketing.

This is a time to stay curious, be on top of the data, and be watching shows like Marketing Against the Grain because we’re trying to give you the net-new marketing playbooks.

Last week we published a new playbook all about micro-audience targeting — how AI can allow us to be more proactive, go reach people, not wait for the click. Divide people into small audiences and create personalized marketing experiences to proactively pull them in versus waiting for them to click on something you created.

So that’s the stats.

Google 10 years ago: two pages scraped, one visit.

Six months ago: six pages scraped, one visit.

Today, because of AI Overviews: 18 pages scraped, one visit.

So in 10 years, it’s gotten nine times harder to get traffic — and AI Mode has only just been rolled out.

And then OpenAI — becoming the de facto AI assistant search platform — we were at about 250 pages scraped to one visit. Now, 1,500 pages scraped to one visit because people trust AI assistants.

And he even said: in Claude, it’s 60,000 pages scraped to one visit. People stay within those platforms.

This is the most sizable shift in the way that we market and grow businesses that has probably ever happened. And everything is going to be rewritten over the next 6 to 12 to 18 months.

That’s the episode. Subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain if you want the new future marketing playbooks as we find them and as we start to build them out. We’ll give them to you.

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