AI is stealing Google's organic traffic.
Apparently, Google is helping too.
Kevin Indig analyzed Similarweb data from 10,000 US websites. Over 2 years:
📉 Organic search: -13.2%
📈 Paid search: +21%
In Jan - Aug 2026, organic search lost 7.1B visits while paid search gained 2.6B YoY.
Paid search offset just over a third of the organic losses.
Good news: you can buy back some of your lost organic traffic.
Bad news: you have to buy it.
Karolis Stasiulevicius retweeted
What actually happens under the hood during Web Hydration? Our lead engineer, Etienne Ellie broke this down live at OxyCon, and the demo repo is now public
github.com/ScrapingBee/scrap…
We spent €3,274 on ChatGPT ads.
Clicks: 39,779. New paying customers: 0 (so far).
ChatGPT Ads became available to French companies on Sept 2. We launched the same day.
What we tested:
- Global vs US targeting
- Optimizing for registrations vs purchases
What we saw:
- CPC: €0.04 - €1.56
- CPL: €1 - €22
- CPA: still no conversions after €3,274 spent
Since ads only show on Free and Go, there may be an audience mismatch. A meaningful share of developers willing to pay for a scraping API may already be on paid ChatGPT plans - and therefore never see the ads.
Anyone running B2B campaigns on ChatGPT seeing different results?
