Go and look at your impressions. They're probably up.
Seer Interactive pulled Search Console data from 53 brands: 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion impressions, January 2025 through February 2026. On the queries where the brand got named inside Google's AI answer, impressions went from 15.8 million to 33.1 million in a single month.
Twice as seen. The same visitors.
So where is everybody?
Cloudflare sits in front of about a fifth of the web. In July they reported that more than half of all traffic on the internet is now non-human. Fifty-two percent of crawler requests are for AI training, up from 22% last spring. In the most heavily crawled categories, human traffic has dropped by as much as 40% in under a year.
Not so long ago every piece of advice pointed the same way. Write for the careful reader. The one who reads the whole thing, in order, and never gets bored.
That reader now exists.
It's a crawler.
Featured image: Ennemond Alexandre Petitot: Masquerade Costumes: Two Engravers (1771)
