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- [00:00]
A
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 Clarifier give recently. Just about how quickly visits and clicks are drying up to content publishers, websites and really what it means for the future of marketing and growth. Let's get into this quick reaction video from some of the most incredible stats that you will get this week on just how quickly the entire shape of the Internet is changing because of AI.
- [00:36]
B
We'll be right back to today's show, but first I gotta tell you about a week that you're not gonna wanna miss. It is a highlight of my year. Every year. It is inbound, which is HubSpot's annual event where we bring together the best attendees, the best speakers, the best experts in sales in marketing and customer success in AI. We all learn together and we all figure out how to grow our businesses better in the coming year. And this year it's no exception. It's a fire lineup. It's going to be at the Moscone center in San Francisco, California, September 3rd through the 5th. So it's a great way to kind of close out Q3 and kick off Q4 really strong and have your heads right for 2026 because you're going to learn and hear from Amy Poehler, Dario Amadi of Anthropic, Darkesh Patel, Sean Evans from Hot Ones, Marquise Brownlee, Glennon Doyle, and the world's best speakers and experts across marketing, sales, customer service, AI. They are all at Inbound. Hundreds of amazing sessions. And you know, it's more than just the sessions. It's about the networking. It's about learning from your fellow attendees, your peers, understanding what people are doing really well, where people are getting stuck. That is how you break out. That is how you are going to grow better and faster in 2026. You're not going to want to miss it. You can go to inbound.com/register to secure your ticket and your spot for Inbound 2025.
- [02:21]
A
Okay, so this is a quick video from the CEO of Cloudflare and I thought this was some of the most important data that has been shared recently. So we're going to get into it right here. We're going to play some of the video and I'm going to stop the video and narrate this as we go along. But like, let's just have a listen to what he said.
- [02:36]
C
Best metric that we found to describe how much harder your business as a, as a media creator, as a content creator, has gotten is to look at just Google data. How many pages did Google scrape in exchange for how many visitors did they send?
- [02:51]
A
I think that's a good way to think about the value creation of the Internet. The way kind of Google built its business with content publishers is this somewhat partnership, right? This, you know, unspoken partnership that we scrape your content and in return for us scraping your content, we give you traffic back and that's why all of this actually works. So that kind of visit to scrape ratio is a good way to think about how the Internet actually works. Today, Google is responsible for, I think, 67% of all referral traffic across the Internet. So every website is somewhat reliant on Google website traffic. Google search traffic with you is you.
- [03:27]
C
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.
- [03:37]
A
They scrape two pieces of your content and they give you a visit back. That's a pretty good partnership.
- [03:41]
C
What has changed over that period of time? Over the next 10 years, up until six months ago, we've added 2 billion people to the Internet. We went from 4 billion to 6 billion people using the Internet. So that should be good for you as a content creator.
- [03:52]
A
2 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.
- [04:00]
C
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 actually think that for every scrape, you would have gotten more visitors. But you all know that's not what's happened. How much harder did it get over the last 10 years to be a publisher? And I've asked that to a bunch of people, and the answer is it's about three times harder. And that lines up exactly with the data.
- [04:26]
A
So I think there's a couple of quick points here. So 2 billion more people have come onto the Internet. Google are 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 till you hear what's happening today.
- [04:47]
C
75%, actually, not now. 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 that traffic anymore. And that's the good news. Because what's happened in the last six months? The answer is that in the last six months it has gotten even harder than it did even over the last previous 10 years. And so the traffic ratio now is for every 18 pages that Google takes from you, you get one visitor.
- [05:20]
A
Pretty incredible when you think about it, right? 75% of all of the questions that people are asking Google get answered on their website where they are able to monetize off ads. And, and the publishers who are creating all this content get nothing, get nothing in return. Now, they used to get visits, right? Keep that stat in your mind. They used to get one visit for every six pages scraped.
- [05:43]
C
Three times worse in six months. And what changed? We can track this on region by region by region by region. And the answer is AI overview, where they're taking your content and someone else's content. Someone else's content. They're smashing it all together. They're giving you an answer right there. And I bet that the answer today is that 90% of queries to Google get answered without people clicking on a single link.
- [06:04]
A
How incredible is that? We started 10 years ago, two pages for one visit. Now that didn't really change that much. Up until about six months ago, we had 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 in Google we're going to get into OpenAI. But do stay tuned for OpenAI because the stats there are off the wall. Google are giving you one visit for every 18 pages scraped because of AI overviews. And we're going to go from around 75% of all of the questions being answered on Google to 90%. So Google is basically just monetizing other people's content and taking the ability to monetize that content away from that publisher. That is not good for the future health of the web. Right? The way the web has been built is there's this value exchange. We create content, you give us visitors and we can monetize some of those visitors and you can monetize some of the content. And that has fundamentally been 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 search trigger an AI overview. Google are starting to 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, very rapidly. But let's get into some of the 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?
- [07:39]
C
What's the ratio for OpenAI six months ago? 250 to 1. What is it today? 1500 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 that means those three things go away.
- [07:56]
A
I just want to give a quick call out to myself here as soon as I use ChatGPT. And you cannot go all the way back to the very first episode that we covered in November after it had launched. I literally said this would happen. Humans will always default to easy and fast, every single time. And I talked about the fact that eventually humans would become very comfortable using AI assistance to get questions. And a lot of the feedback I got is I'm wrong. People would not trust AI. They would not query AI because they understood it hallucinates. They wouldn't trust it. They would always default to the blue links. And I just didn't believe that to be true because the very first time I used ChatGPT, I could see it was going to be a much better experience than actually me having to go to the blue links and mine all this information myself. And that is exactly what's happened. And OpenAI was already tough enough. 250 pages for one visit. And Google has gone on 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? 1500 pages scraped one visit. Because people are very comfortable getting their answers through an AI assistant, because we just become more used to that experience. We trust it more, we believe that, hey, I'm sure it's fine as long as it's easier and it's faster. I'm always going to default to that experience. And that is fundamentally going to break the way the Internet works today.
- [09:30]
C
And so if you believe that the business model of original content creation is driving visitors to that content, I just have a really bad story for you, which is the future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of Your content, not the original content. And what I'm worried about, why I'm wearing black today is I don't know if you can't sell subscriptions and you just can't sell ads and you don't get an ego hit from knowing that people are consuming your stuff, why anyone's going to create content.
- [10:05]
A
For someone who's created content their entire time they've actually been on the web have always enjoyed creating content. I think that is a sad thing for all of us to consider about. One of the potential outcomes of AI, it's breaking the relationship between the person, the publisher and the engines who actually rely on that content to monetize it, the aggregators. And I do think that is going to be problematic and it's really problematic for marketers because, let's admit it, most of the scalable marketing models that we built today, Google search, has been at the heart of that. But it's not just that. Right. Let's actually play out what's going to happen. And I think if you kind of play out the last two years, it basically maps to what we said when we first experienced ChatGPT. So I think we have some sort of history of being mostly right here. And I think what is going to happen is search traffic is going to die out. People are going to gravitate towards AI assistance on those AI assistants. We're going to actually look at share of voice, which is a brand metric. We're going to just look to see how, how many impressions our brand got within those AI systems, which is nowhere near as good as being able to track a click, a visit, a customer. But it's not just that. What will happen is people have to try to build scalable models somewhere. Scalable models, forecasted models are. Well, if I do these things, I can equate that to about 10, 20, 30 customers a month. And so what we'll do is we'll start to gravitate much more towards paid advertising because we are not able to do it in an organic way. Right. Social media platforms are locking down their platforms to promotional content. If you use links or you use promotional content in your social post, you usually get less and less engagement. They're becoming closed walls. Google is now becoming a closed world platform where they want to keep people on their platform. These AI assistants are closed walls. They for the most part want to keep you in their platform and they do a great job of that. And so we gravitate towards paid advertising. The cost of paid advertising is going to go up and up and up because there's going to be more and more competition and that is going to be uneconomical for a lot of businesses. How do we actually do that? And so I do think the way that we market is going to drastically change because the way you market is really predicated on the way platforms work, aggregators work, Internet works, consumer behavior works. You actually have to market into those things. And those things are rapidly, rapidly changing in a way we've really never seen before, maybe since the Internet itself started to become popular and we gravitated towards offline marketing to online marketing. But we are going to rewrite the ways that we have done marketing. And I think this is a time to really stay curious, be on top of the data, be watching shows like Marketing against the Green because we are trying to give you the net new marketing playbooks, right? Last week we published a new playbook all about micro audience targeting, which is how AI can allow us to be more proactive, go and reach people, not wait for the click. Actually divide people into small audiences and create personalized tailored marketing experiences for them to proactively pull them in versus waiting for them to click on something that you created. So that is the stats to give that summary. 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 we've gone nine times harder to get traffic. And AI mode is only just being rolled out now. And then OpenAI, which is becoming the de facto AI assistant search platform, we were at about 250 pages scraped to one visit. Now 1500 pages scraped to one visit because people trust AI assistance. 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 rewrote over the next six to 12 to 18 months. That's the episode. Subscribe to Marketing Sigourne if you want all of the new future marketing playbooks as we find them, as we start to build them out, we will give them to you.
- [14:20]
C
Sam.