Another Fall in Organic Traffic Because People Get What They Need from Generative Summaries

Last November, I wrote about the impact generative AI was having on technology websites. Things have become tougher since with the introduction of generative summaries. Take Figure 1 as an example. I asked Google a question and instead of responding with a list of websites that might contain good answers, Google generates a summary overview of the available information. There’s no need to go anywhere near the article that I published on June 6 because there’s enough information available in the summary to answer the question for most people.

Bing has its own take on generative summaries. I didn’t use it as an example because Bing search results are so horribly bad, especially when it comes to finding content in my site.

The result of the Google changes is a further decline in website traffic. And it’s not just me saying that this is the case. A recent Bain & Company survey found that “80% of US consumers rely on “zero-click” search results, meaning they get the information they need from the search engine’s results page and don’t click through to another website.”

Bain attributes the change in user behavior to the effect of AI search engines and generative summaries, resulting in a 15% to 25% reduction in organic web traffic, or page views created by people who find a website through unpaid search engine results (the listings displayed by Google, Bing, and other search engines) rather than through paid advertising or other marketing channels.

Why Does Falling Organic Traffic Matter?

The thing about generative AI is that it can only generate based on knowledge that exists in its LLMs or can find in a website. Generative AI doesn’t create new knowledge: to some extent, generative AI steals and reuses the work done by many people to understand, analyze, document, and discuss information about all the different topics indexed by the search engines and eventually create those generative summaries.

The model works when search engines directed everyone to the source websites. Those who write are happy that the web views recorded for their site reflect interest in their work. They might also benefit from advertising on the site. Depending on the page views, the revenue from advertising might be enough to live on. More usually, it might cover the domain and hosting fees.

Sites run by commercial companies to publicize their offerings commonly publish information to attract people to the site. The quality of the information varies greatly. Some (CodeTwo Software is an example in the Microsoft 365 space) is well written and very useful. Other sites hype up the problems solved by their current product (the need to spend lots of money to manage Entra ID apps is a common theme today) or dramatically over-emphasize why their product is needed. One example in that category is a site that tells people to run the EDBUTIL utility to defragment Exchange Server databases (last needed with maybe Exchange 2003).

From what I can see from the data for several websites, new content still receives attention and high page views because it is often linked to notifications sent via email, Twitter, Bluesky, or other media channels. A few days later, that material will be absorbed by AI and become less valuable in terms of driving the page views that search engines once sent to the host sites.

Writers Will Stop Sharing Content

The point is that if people and companies don’t see a return on their investment, they won’t write as many articles as they have in the past. A well-written and researched article might take four to six hours to put together, and longer if some PowerShell or other code examples are needed. Who wants to put in that effort, or pay writers to do that work, if page view numbers are continuing to fall month-over-month. Life is too short to throw away hours of effort for no reward (fiscal or just the pleasure of knowing that people read your content).

A real strength of technical communities focusing on topics like Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and development technologies has been the willingness of people to share their knowledge and expertise, except perhaps via paid subscriptions to Substack or Patreon sites where exclusive access to content can be offered, perhaps for a period before open publication.

If open access to knowledge weakens, we will all be worse off. No amount of generative AI can guide people to a solution that hasn’t ever been documented. The information in the LLMs will gradually degrade because less new knowledge is being publicly shared. Over time, new knowledge might become less and less available to the LLMs and generative AI will become less valuable because it can only output old material.

Publishing the 2026 Edition

For now, the content shared on office365itpros.com will remain public and open to all. I have considered using Substack to host articles that aren’t related to book updates, with free subscriptions to that content for people who buy the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We might still go down that route, but for now we’re concentrating on publishing the 2026 edition on July 1, 2025.

I’m interested in hearing what people think about the effect AI has on content that many depend on to do their job. Please let us know your thoughts by posting a comment.