Ziff Davis says organic Google traffic fell about 37% in a year, and it isn't planning for a recovery

Ziff Davis, the owner of sites such as IGN, said visits from Google organic search fell about 37% year over year in the third quarter. CEO Vivek Shah shared the figure on the company's earnings call with analysts on November 6.

According to Search Engine Journal, in a report published November 9, Shah said the same quarter last year had already seen a drop of about 23%, which puts the cumulative loss over two years at more than 50%. “We are not planning for a search recovery,” the CEO said, adding that he expects visits to keep falling.

Quarterly revenue fell 5.6% to $289.3 million. Shah credited the businesses that don't depend on Google traffic, such as subscriptions and apps, with keeping the decline smaller.

What the 2.7 billion figure actually measures

Shah also cited a Search Console number: the company's digital media sites logged about 2.7 billion impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode during the quarter, nearly 10 times “the clicks those same sites received from Google Search,” by his estimate.

According to Google's help documentation, the Search Console generative AI report counts how many times a site's links appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and those impressions are part of the site's total search impressions. A click on a link inside an AI Overview or AI Mode, meanwhile, is folded into the overall click total. As of November 8, Google did not document a separate count of clicks coming from AI.

In practice, Shah's math compares impressions in AI features with all search clicks. That means the result can't be read as an AI click-through rate.

Where traffic fell and what held up

Shah said the tech and shopping brands are under the most pressure from search traffic. Revenue in that segment fell 3.8% to $82 million, a decline that has narrowed for three consecutive quarters. Social commerce and the relaunched RetailMeNot app helped offset it.

IGN, the group's largest property by search visits, held up better. Much of that traffic comes from gaming help, with lots of maps and content that is hard to replicate, and the site gets a lot of direct traffic.

On earlier calls, Shah had said AI Overviews appeared on 29% of the queries that drive most of the company's traffic (November 2025) and on about 50% of the queries relevant to its sites (August). Monetizing content in AI answers is “the priority,” he said, and the company is open to licensing deals. He expects Ziff Davis's lawsuit against OpenAI to help bring clarity to the issue. “There is a gap between usage and monetization,” he said.

What's coming in December

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK regulator, has given Google until December 3 to provide publishers with impressions, clicks and click-through rate for AI-powered search features in the UK, aggregated across AI Overviews and AI Mode. Search Console is mentioned as one example of where that data could live.

For brand and AEO teams, Shah's math offers a benchmark: any site with the generative AI report can compare its AI impressions against its search clicks for the same period. The caveat is not to read the result as an AI click-through rate. If Google starts breaking out AI clicks from December 3, that comparison becomes possible.