Why is SEO traffic declining?

SEO and paid-ads expert Brenton Thomas explains why organic search traffic is dropping: Google's num=100 change wiped out bot impressions, and AI overviews are now stealing clicks on top of it.

Quick Answer

• SEO took a beating this year: Google's num=100 change wiped out a lot of bot-driven impressions in Search Console.
• AI overviews are stealing traffic on top of that.
• Holding organic traffic steady, while referral traffic from tools like ChatGPT grows, is now a win.

Why organic search traffic is shrinking

There are two forces pulling traffic down at once. First, the removal of the num=100 search parameter killed a lot of bot-driven impressions, which looks ugly in Google Search Console but actually reflects human traffic more honestly. Second, AI overviews are taking clicks before anyone reaches a result.

"If I can just hold the traffic steady at this point, because search is being cannibalized by AI at this point." — Brenton Thomas

Brenton's read: if he can hold organic search steady while referral traffic from AI tools ticks up, that counts as a win. The work is also getting more external now, your social profile, what's on YouTube, video.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did SEO impressions drop in Google Search Console?

Google removed the num=100 parameter that let tools pull 100 results at once. That wiped out a lot of bot-driven impressions. Brenton says it looks bad on the chart, but it depicts human traffic a lot better now.

Are AI overviews hurting SEO traffic?

Yes. Brenton says AI overviews are stealing traffic and that search is "being cannibalized by AI." The goal now is to hold organic traffic steady rather than expect it to grow.

What is a realistic SEO goal right now?

Hold organic search steady while capturing the small but growing referral traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT, and start building visibility externally on social media and YouTube.

Full Clip Transcript

SEO has been taking a beating this last year. Num equals 100, you can't do 100 search results. But a lot of bot-related websites, like SEO crawling tools, would use that query, it to the end of a URL. And that's been wiped out, so it killed impressions inside a Google Search Console pretty badly. It looks bad, but it's more, it depicts human traffic a lot better now. It kind of pushed out all the bot traffic. And then have AI overviews, that's stealing traffic as well. So as I'm applying SEO tactics, if I can just hold the traffic steady at this point, because search is being cannibalized by AI at this point. So if I can hold the traffic steady for organic search, and then at the same time I can see little bit of increases in referral traffic from like Chachibiti, then that's a win. And on the AI side, definitely it's starting to grow into like you need to work on your social media profile. You need to work on like what's on YouTube and like video. It's more external now.

Full Interview Transcript

Dane: Hey everybody, I'm Dane Frederiksen I am a B2B video strategy and production expert. And today I am joined by Brenton Thomas, who is a marketing expert, SEO expert. What else do we need to know about you and your background today?

Brenton: Yeah, paid ads, SEO, and focused on bottom of the funnel. That's where all the thought lives. That's where all the, most of the desire for the clients we work with is bottom of funnel leads and revenue.

Dane: Nice. So top of mind for you these days, this AI madness that we got going on, what's like occupying the most brain space for you right now?

Brenton: Yeah, yeah, looking for ways to apply AI. I would say I found a couple ways to use AI, you know, in particular reaching out to reporters and generating backlinks. We've I've gotten some really high-powered backlinks by doing that. And outside of that, finding ways for AI to be used in a more meaningful and deeper way. I find AI to be a little generic in its responses sometimes, so I really have to work with it and rewrite my prompts kind of over and over. And sometimes I'm like, well, let me just go ahead and just write it from scratch myself. So that's what I'm focused on.

Dane: Yeah, it's, um, you start scratching your head after a while. was like, is this really efficient? Maybe, maybe you should skip the whole thing. So yeah, I'm going through that right now too, with a Claude code. I just got my hands on it a couple of weeks ago and blew my mind and I was losing sleep and I built all these things and realized that some of them I kind of built wrong because I've never developed software before. So, um, got back to basics and like, I think I'm now on a solid foundation of like, okay, start with stuff, the small and repeatable. You can check it, verify it, and then start building on things on top of that. And it's cool to hear that you're, getting that backlink traction. I'm getting more and more curious about the whole reporters thing. Cause like I was talking to a PR friend the other day about like PR I think has really viewed so much about like getting stories written about you, getting talked about, getting buzz, right? But I've always thought that PR also had this owned, owned media, not just earned media aspect to it. And as a video creator, I'm like, wait, why don't we like doing more with owned media? And I think we're kind of at that inflection point. And I'm kind of curious where like, you see that now is when you get reporters, how do you, how do you like get in front of them? Because they're using AI to search for stuff, right? That's how they are finding information leads, whatever. So if you give them the content that they can find, I feel like that's a pretty solid strategy to get written about. I don't know how that would dovetail with what you're doing. What are your thoughts about that sort of intersection?

Brenton: Yeah, we use a website called quote it. And so all the reporters, it connects us to the reporter. And there's lots of reporters asking questions in there about very specific topics, typically industry specific. And so we're in there giving responses. Typically, when we're responding to a reporter, we always write it in our own language, our own thought first. We don't just ask AI to answer the question. We'll write it in our own original thoughts. And then AI would just rewrite it, like clean it up.

Dane: Mm-hmm.

Brenton: So we're kind of using AI as like a advanced grammarly in a way. Not to take anything away from AI, but we just found we have better results and it's much more, it sounds more thoughtful when we write it first and AI just cleans up the grammar.

Dane: Right. Yeah. the then the challenge for you would be what? Like, you know, I think part of it is there's got to be like an education component now of like the the difference between SEO and GEO. And like, what does that mean for us now? What's changed? Because I know all the SEO fundamentals that that worked before are still part of that. But then there's like this other thing that's happening, too. So like, where do you see the challenge there?

Brenton: Yeah, so the clients that I've been doing SEO for. SEO has been taking a beating this last year. Num equals 100, you can't do 100 search results. But a lot of bot-related websites, like SEO crawling tools, would use that query, it to the end of a URL. And that's been wiped out, so it killed impressions inside a Google Search Console pretty badly. It looks bad, but it's more, it depicts human traffic a lot better now. It kind of pushed out all the bot traffic. And then have AI overviews, that's stealing traffic as well. So as I'm applying SEO tactics, if I can just hold the traffic steady at this point, because search is being cannibalized by AI at this point. So if I can hold the traffic steady for organic search, and then at the same time I can see little bit of increases in referral traffic from like Chachibiti. then that's a win. And on the AI side, definitely it's starting to grow into like you need to work on your social media profile. You need to work on like what's on YouTube and like video. It's more external now.

Dane: Right. So the overlap between our two worlds is sort of SEO, GEO world, and then the content world. seems like we're headed in the same direction. It's always been about making valuable content, but it's now it's less about the bots and more about like what's really valuable. What are people really looking for? So like, what does that mean as far as the opportunity? What's the play there do you think?

Brenton: think if you can look at it in a more holistic way, so... Most of that SEO is very focused on your own website and what you're doing on the technical side the content you're writing inside of your blog posts, but if you can look at it in a very Holistic way in terms of like how does how does all this come together? Like how am I being featured on third-party websites? What a reporter saying about me? What's on social media etc and my own website then that that's the play right there It's more time-consuming. It's a lot more work, but if you start now you can get ahead of it.

Dane: Right. And then there's probably, or what I'm sensing is there's a problem now about measurement. It's like AI is little bit of a black box. You don't necessarily know what's going to get cited and that makes it hard to measure. And that probably makes it hard to get funding for, cause you don't, you know, I don't know a lot of execs that are super excited about non, non-clear ROI activities, right? So like, how do we start to think about measurement in a, you know, SEO is sort of like causational. where this is like, AI is more like a correlation, right? Like that's what I'm gathering. Is that sound right to you? Is that pointing in a different direction for measurement?

Brenton: Yeah, yeah it is. There's a tool, Brandy, that I've been using with some of the Hinge Partners. And it doesn't tell you the amount of interest in a question you ask or your prompt. And with SEO, you could put in a target keyword and it'll give you the amount of search volume for that month. And you're like, well, I want to choose a word that people are actually searching online for. So there is, it's less, it's more nuanced now. It's not as like straightforward, like go for this keyword and you will get this traffic. Now there's variations in the way you can ask in your prompts. That changes it a lot. So the ROI is harder to track, that's for sure.

Dane: So if I had to like try and explain this to one of my daughters, like it seems like you used to be able to buy the ranking that you wanted. If you had deep enough pockets, you could buy that number one spot. Now it's not so clear, but the play is probably like, like you said, if you'd like to sprinkle stuff out there and create this sort of like, I don't know, content minefield of different ways that they can talk about you and find you, that seems like that's what we're talking about here. Does that sound right?

Brenton: Yeah, and I've noticed that AI is not... Okay, so like Google takes into account the newness of the article or the blog post or whatever the page is. It takes into account that. And AI will go back and pull, like if you ask it for sources, it'll pull something from like 10 years ago and there's newer, more current information on that topic. So it seems like you can sprinkle information and information could be like, it can get really old and AI will use it as if it was written yesterday. It doesn't take into account the publish date of the page.

Dane: Yeah. So we're kind of talking about context, right? Like I've heard this term, what was it? Context drift or something like that where, I experienced this, experienced this working with clog code too, like in a long session, after a while it starts forgetting the things that we already talked about and it kind of gets off on this tangent. And I think that's kind of the same mechanic that we're talking about is this sort of unpredictable nature of it. Is that factoring for you?

Brenton: Yeah, yeah, in fact, I I've noticed the same thing. It starts to veer off and I I don't even go too deep into my conversations with AI. tend to. Like I'll ask it kind of like three questions and I'll break up what I need done into parts, right? So let's say there's 10 parts to do the entire project We'll just do part one and I'm gonna ask you like four questions and then we're done and then I start to open a new message and I ask four questions and Keep moving on to each part and that works a lot better from what I've

Dane: Right. So, a little bit of a shift in, in question here, but like, if I wanted to know how I was getting discovered in AI, like results, what's, what would be like the right scientific methodology in your mind? Like, I would think you'd have to look at different platforms like perplexity, Gemini, Claude, chat GPT. You'd probably have to do multiple sessions. on a certain term, you probably have to do this over time, maybe like once a week or once a month or something like that. What do you think that would be like a good way for just anyone to go look and see a realistic picture of how you're showing up?

Brenton: It's still a work in progress. you know, know everyone's, everyone's trying to figure this out. What I'm thinking at this point in time, I'm sure if you asked me again in two months, it's going to be completely different. Yeah, next week. But at this point, what I think is the best way is. You need some type of like intent for a topic. So I still think use SEO. So I use SEMrush. That's my SEO tool I use. Find a target keyword that has good volume and then turn that keyword into a prompt. Right. So let's just say what is the best accounting firm is the target keyword. All right. It would be shorter than that. Best accounting firm. Right. And then turn that into a prompt. So what is the best accounting firm? And then use a tool like Brandy and then that'll give you like what are the sources that are being pulled when someone asks that prompt and that's probably the best way to go about it at this point in time. It's kind of combines SEO and GEO a little bit.

Dane: Right. Why I've heard that I saw this article the other day by what's his name? Prosser. He was basically saying that Geo is a scam because everyone's kind of selling it like they can tell you how it's going to work, but it's not really that cut and dried. So yeah, we're in a weird space now. The sort of parting thought that you would want to share with your audience, like the content marketers, marketers in general, what's like the one thing that you think that they should know is like a takeaway from like your specific corner of this industry?

Brenton: Yeah, my main thought on... is you have to focus on email marketing and Google Ads. And now you have Google Ads running. And now AI is about to come out with GEO. you still want to do Google Ads. You still want to do SEO. And you just have to add one more thing onto your marketing mix. I think that's my main message. Nothing's going to die.

Dane: Yeah, just what marketers need it is one more thing to worry about. One more tech stack, one more competitive landscape. Thanks. Thanks everybody.

Brenton: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. It definitely makes it a kind of a big company game, right? Because you need all you need the resources to do all this stuff. And it kind of pushes the small businesses down. And it kind of makes it so that all the big companies are just going to compete. yeah, like, it pretty much Yeah, creates a divide. Yeah.

Dane: until they all merge into one thing. Yeah. Okay. So if as we wrap up, if people are liking what they're hearing from you and they want to get in touch or if they need some support on your end of things, how should they get in touch with you?

Brenton: Yeah, through my LinkedIn profile. Send me a message. I'll give you my LinkedIn profile link. You can put in the show notes. And yeah, that's best way to get a hold of me.

Dane: OK, awesome. Well, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for your insights.

Brenton: Yeah, thanks for having me.