Where did the visitors go? Google since December, and the rise of AI search

Something shifted in December, and many small websites felt it without knowing its name. Orders slowed, the phone went quieter, and the site sat there looking exactly as it always had. The site had not changed. The way people find it had.

This is the plain story of what happened - what Google changed in December, what AI search has become since, and what it means for a small business with a website. Not to alarm you; to show you where the visitors went, and how to be found where they now look.

The quiet December that moved the goalposts

Between 11 and 29 December 2025, Google rolled out one of its periodic "core updates" - a rebalancing of how it decides which pages deserve to be seen. There was no announcement of new rules, because the rules did not change. What changed was the weighing. Pages showing first-hand knowledge - the maker writing about what they make, real detail, real experience - moved up. Mass-produced pages with nothing new to say moved down, and slow pages were marked down even when the words were good. One analysis of the December update by the SEO toolmaker SE Ranking found that around 15 per cent of pages that had been in Google's top ten vanished from the top hundred altogether. That is a vendor's own dataset rather than independent research, so read it as an indication of size, not a measurement.

And December was not a one-off. Google has run two further core updates since - one in March, one in May - a steady drumbeat of rebalancing, each one asking the same question a little more firmly: does this page know what it is talking about, and can a robot tell?

That last part matters more than it ever did, because of who is now doing the reading.

The rise of the answering machines

For twenty years, searching meant a page of blue links, and the game was to be one of them. That game is ending - not because Google shrank, but because the answer moved.

Ask Google a question now and there is a fair chance an AI-written answer appears above every link. The last independent count with a published method - Pew Research Center, reading 68,879 real searches made by 900 people - put it at about one in five, in March 2025. Google has widened them since, and nobody outside Google publishes a current figure with its workings, so treat any larger number you see as an estimate rather than a measurement. Ask ChatGPT, which OpenAI reports is used by hundreds of millions of people every week, and there are no links at all in the old sense - just an answer, with a few sites quoted as its sources.

The result shows up in the numbers, and the cleanest number we have is Pew's. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a search result on 8 per cent of visits. When one did not, they clicked on 15 per cent - nearly twice as often. For the websites that used to receive those clicks, that is the missing traffic. It did not go to a competitor. It went to the answer itself.

Here is where a lot of writing on this subject cheers up too quickly, so we will not. Every AI answer is built from a handful of pages the assistant read and trusted enough to quote, and it is tempting to call that the new front page. But in the same Pew data, people clicked one of those cited sources on just 1 per cent of visits. Being quoted is not a windfall, and anyone selling it to you as one is selling you something.

What being quoted actually buys is harder to count and still worth having: your name, your words and your prices in front of someone at the moment they are working out who to trust, whether or not they click that day. Treat it as being recommended rather than being visited. The mistake is to expect it to refill the traffic you used to get.

So the game has not ended. It has changed shape. It used to be: rank among ten links and win the click. It is becoming: be readable and trustworthy enough that the machine doing the answering quotes you.

What this asks of a small website

Here is the part that should reassure you: the machines reward exactly the things an honest site should have anyway. There is no trick to learn. There are five plain jobs.

Say what you do, where, in real words. An assistant cannot quote a homepage that says "welcome to my website". It can quote "handmade stoneware, thrown in Margate, seconds and commissions welcome". The words people search with need to exist on your page - see Say what you do in the words people actually use.

Answer the real questions. When someone asks an assistant "how long does a commission take", it looks for a page that has already answered plainly. Write down the questions customers actually ask you, and answer them on the page - see Answer the real questions, in plain words.

Let the robots read you at all. Some websites serve their words in a way many robots never see, and some have almost no words to read. A site can be beautiful to a person and blank to a machine - and a machine that reads a blank page quotes someone else.

Be quick. December made speed count double: slow pages lost ground even with good words. Most of your visitors are on phones, and so are Google's own measurements.

Show who you are. The assistants weigh trust the way a careful customer does - who is behind this, where are they, who vouches for them. A name, a place, a way to reach you, and links to the places that vouch for you all make you safer to quote.

Find out where you stand

None of this needs guessing. Bernard keeps a free checker - the ocean - that reads your front page exactly the way a robot does, no allowances made, and shows you plainly what the machines can and cannot read: your words, your pictures, your label, who vouches for you, and Google's own stopwatch. It takes under a minute, and it tells you honestly if something is already good.

The web did not get worse for small, honest sites this year. In one way it got better: the machines doing the choosing have no interest in whoever shouts loudest. They quote whoever answers best. That is a contest a small maker can win.

For the business-strategy view of the same shift, bernard's sister consultancy has written The Ocean of Noise: why 96% of web pages get no Google traffic at Context is Everything.