The loss of Google traffic is a seismic shift in how websites earn their traffic. Whilst some sites are saying Reddit and Facebook are making up for the loss of that traffic, one can’t deny stats recently shared by Cloudflare’s CEO.

For every crawled page, Google sent one visitor to a publisher. Just over 10 years ago it was 2 crawled pages to 1 visitor and today that number is 18 crawled pages to 1 vistor:

If you overlay the referral traffic from OpenAI versus Google, the picture completely changes. OpenAI crawls 1,500 pages for every visit to a publisher:

The chart above doesn’t include Anthropic which is up to 60,000 pages per visit. Clearly the dynamic has changed and will continue to accelerate further. Users of AI ChatBots do not click the sources.