Google traffic fell 13% across 10,000 US websites in two years, but about 1 site in 100 accounted for 40% of the lost visits, and the typical small site gained 2.7%, according to Kevin Indig's Growth Memo research using Similarweb estimates. My own jewelry store's Google visits rose 13% in a year, or 4% without one unusual month, and four of the eight orders I could trace started with an email. For a small studio, the useful move is to check your own numbers, answer one real customer question on its own page, and send one email a month your list cannot get anywhere else.
Part of my job is reading the studies the top voices in search keep passing around, then sorting out what actually applies to a one-person studio. Lately the story everywhere is that Google traffic is collapsing. It got so deflating I caught myself saying it out loud: it feels like all we do lately is concede defeat. Every week brings another chart, and if you have spent years making your website findable, it is hard not to wonder whether that time was wasted.
Then a study came out that splits the decline by what kind of website is losing it. It changed how I read every one of those charts, and I think it will change how you read them too. The good news is that you don’t have to read them. I break it all down for you below. Here is the short version: the losses are real, but they are landing mostly on giant information sites. Small, specific sites mostly held steady, and the things that kept mine steady are things any one-person studio can do. I list them at the end.
Is Google traffic really collapsing?
On average, yes, and the average is hiding almost everything. Kevin Indig, who writes the Growth Memo newsletter, worked with data from Similarweb, a company that estimates website traffic, on 10,000 websites in the US and 10,000 in France. Over the two years to August 2026, organic traffic (the free, unpaid visits that come from Google's regular results) fell 13% in the US and 24% in France.
Those are the numbers that get shared. But Indig found the losses are not spread evenly. About 1 website in every 100 accounted for 40% of all the visits lost in the US. Most of the damage is concentrated in a small number of very large sites.
The biggest losers are publishers: sites whose product is information. They lost about 42% of their Google traffic in both countries. Take publishers out, and the US decline drops from 13% to under 8%. When an AI answer can tell you what nacre is or what the Hope diamond is worth, the site that used to answer that question loses the visit.
Not all of it is AI, either. Google has been showing more ads, and grouping them under a "Sponsored results" label that stays on screen as you scroll, which pushes the free results further down the page. Indig is careful here, and I will be too: it is a mix of causes, not one villain.
Out of every 100 Google visits two years ago, how many are left?
US websites, August 2024 to August 2026. The typical small site ended slightly ahead of where it started.
"Small" means the smallest quarter of the 10,000 US websites in the study.
Source: Kevin Indig, "Organic traffic is down, but it's not all AI," Growth Memo, October 26, 2026. Similarweb traffic estimates, US. Publishers -41.5%, all sites -13.2%, without publishers -7.8%, median small site +2.7%.
What happened to small sites?
The typical small site held steady. Indig split the sites into four groups by size. The median small site, the one in the middle of the smallest group, gained 2.7% of its Google traffic in the US and lost 1.9% in France. Not a boom, but it’s holding steady.
The small group's combined traffic grew much faster than that, but only because a handful of small sites took off and pulled the total up. "Small sites are winning" is not what the data says. "The typical small site held its ground while large sites lost" is a better interpretation.
And "small" in this study means the smallest quarter of the 10,000 websites Indig looked at in each country, sites big enough for a traffic-estimating company to track. A one-person jewelry studio is likely smaller still, and the biggest losses are landing on very large sites and on news and information sites. An independent shop selling what you make is a different business.
Indig's second report adds a detail I did not expect. Direct traffic (people who type your address or come back on their own) held up far better than Google traffic overall, and the typical small site got more of these visits, not fewer: up 14.4% in the US. People came back to the small sites on their own.
What happened to mine?
My two sites held, and grew, over the same stretch. Here are my own Google numbers, pulled from Google Analytics, Google's free tool that shows where a site's visitors come from.
Visits from Google's free results, Andrea Li Designs
Up 13% year over year.
Up 4% if you leave out October in both years. One blog post about a famous royal jewel doubled October 2025 on its own.
Source: Andrea Li, first-party Google Analytics (GA4) for andreali.com, Google organic search sessions, pulled October 26, 2026.
On my jewelry site, Andrea Li Designs, Google visits rose from 6,378 to 7,188 a year, up 13%. One blog post about a famous royal jewel caught a news moment and doubled a single October on its own. Leave October out of both years and the gain is 4%. Still up, just quieter.
On Red Pin Geek, Google visits nearly doubled, from 302 to 557. Part of that is a comeback: in 2025 I deliberately hid my old Pinterest pages from Google, which sent the site close to zero for a while before it climbed back on the new work on being found in Google and in AI answers.
My client Bohemi, an engagement ring studio, saw visits rise 53% year over year after we rebuilt the site, and sales rise 38% at launch, then 58% when we measured again eight months later. You can read how Bohemi's results built up.
Traffic always has more than one cause, and no honest person will tell you otherwise. What I can tell you is that all three sites moved in the right direction while the headlines said collapse. That is enough for me to keep going, and I hope it is enough for you to go look at your own numbers.
Where do my buyers actually come from?
Four of the eight sales I could trace started with an email. Indig's second report asks where visits go when Google traffic shrinks, and the answer surprised me: email. Visits from email grew about 16% in a year, almost as fast as paid ads, and it was not just a few giant brands. The typical site grew email visits by 14.7%.
So I checked my own store. Over the past year my jewelry site had 12 orders from customers, once I took out my own test checkouts. My analytics could trace 8 of them back to where the buyer came from. Four started with an email I sent. Two came from Google, and two from people typing my address. Small numbers, but email led. This year, most of my sales have come through commissions and in person rather than through my website, which is true for plenty of designers who sell at shows and by word of mouth. So these website orders are a slice of my business, and that slice is what I checked.
Here is how I read it. Google brings people to my gemstone guides, the pages that teach. Email is where people come back and buy. Analytics never shows the whole path, so it can't tell me where most of my email readers first found me. Some surely came from a guide they found on Google. What it does show is that four of those orders began with something I wrote to people who chose to hear from me.
Indig's conclusion is the one I have been living: build an audience you can reach again. In his words:
Email gives brands a reason to build an audience they can reach again. Direct gives them a reason to make returning worthwhile. (Kevin Indig, Growth Memo)
For a designer who would rather make jewelry than post on social media every day, that is good news. The list is yours. No algorithm sits between you and your engaged customers.
So is the work still worth it?
Yes, and the strongest evidence I have is not the traffic. The part I can actually prove comes from my AI Visibility Study. Across three independent jewelry brands, every topic that got a real page was named as a source in AI answers, and every similar topic I deliberately left without a page was named zero times. Clear pages that answer real buyer questions get found by Google and named by AI. That is the same work.
Indig lands in the same place:
I'd focus on whether your brand appears when buyers research your category, then connect that visibility to business outcomes. (Kevin Indig, Growth Memo)
In plain terms: make sure buyers can find you when they go looking, then check whether those finds turn into sales. He also says the national averages are context, but "comparable websites offer a more useful benchmark for an individual business." Compare yourself to sites like yours, not to the news sites carrying those scary charts.
If you have been reading those charts and quietly deciding your website is a lost cause, ask one question first: is this chart about a business like mine? Most of the time, it is not. In fact, most of the lost visits in these studies came from a small group of very large websites, the kind that have ranked well on Google for years.
What can a small studio do with this?
Three things, none of which need a tech background. Each one comes straight from what held up in the numbers above. You do not need all three. Pick the one that feels easiest and start there.
- Check your own numbers before you believe a headline. In Google Analytics, compare how many visits came from Google this year with the same months last year. Google moves its menus around, but the report is usually under Reports, then Acquisition. If your number held, the scary chart was not about you.
- Write one page for one question your customers already ask. Think of the question you answer by email or in your messages every month, and give it a page of its own that answers it plainly. That is the kind of page that got named in AI answers in my study, and the kind Google sends people to on my own site.
- Send one email a month your list cannot get anywhere else. A first look at new work, or what is on your bench right now. Most email tools can add a small label to your links so Google Analytics shows which sales came from an email. Check that it is switched on, so you can see what I saw.
I wrote up why AI visibility still matters when the AI traffic is small last month. This piece is the other half: the losses are real, concentrated, and a small, specific site is in the group that mostly held its ground. That is a good place to build from.
It is easy to want a silver bullet, one magic lever that suddenly transforms your business. My own inbox is full of website messages from service providers promising exactly that. The truth is more nuanced. This work can move the needle in the right direction, which is why this industry exists and why I do what I do. Part of my job is cutting through the hype and the doom to get to what is true, and the truth lives in your own data and in the consistent work that shows up in your numbers. So set the national charts aside and look at your own. If you want help, I can make that simpler for you.
Last updated: November 3, 2026.
Sources
- Kevin Indig, "Organic traffic is down, but it's not all AI," Growth Memo, October 26, 2026. Similarweb data, 10,000 websites each in the US and France, September 2023 to August 2026. Similarweb is a company that estimates traffic for sites it cannot see inside, so these are modeled estimates. This issue was sponsored by Semrush. growth-memo.com
- Kevin Indig, "What channels grow when organic search shrinks?," Growth Memo, November 2, 2026. Same Similarweb panels; email and paid search compared January to August 2026 with the same months of 2025. This issue was sponsored by dofollow.com and Semrush. growth-memo.com
- Andrea Li, first-party: Google Analytics for andreali.com and redpingeek.com, October 2024 to September 2026; Squarespace order records for andreali.com, October 2025 to October 2026, checked against Google Analytics on November 2, 2026.
- Bohemi, Red Pin Geek client, results published with permission. Bohemi case study
Continue Learning
- Does AI Visibility Matter Without AI Traffic?: the October piece on what the AI traffic studies measured and what they could not see. This post is its hopeful sequel.
- The Red Pin Geek AI Visibility Study: the three-brand test behind "built pages get cited, unbuilt topics do not."
- Score your own store on the free AI Visibility Score: eight questions on whether your pages answer the questions buyers actually ask, which is the work that held up for small sites.
- Subscribe to the Red Pin Geek Substack (free): weekly inside-view content for jewelry designers building visibility on their own. The Premium tier includes the Convergence Scorecard, which checks the work that moves Google and AI answers at the same time.
- Work with me on your specific store (Readiness Audit $37 / Snapshot $97 / Full Audit $597 / Full Audit + 1:1 call $997): I look at where your visitors and buyers actually come from, and tell you what to fix first.
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