As we keep diving into the new world of ZERO click traffic we keep getting stories and more importantly evidence of what ZERO click means for real websites with significant traffic. Of course this type of evidence and story brings out the links are dead crowd in the industry and the follow up email to invest all into GEO.
So when a guy who actually lost the traffic tells you what happened, it's worth listening.
On November 3, People Inc. got on its Q3 earnings call. That's the publisher behind People, Allrecipes, Investopedia, Verywell and a few dozen other brands you have almost certainly tried to get a link from. CEO Neil Vogel said this:
"We've lost nearly 70% of our Google search traffic over the last few years."
Seventy percent. From one of the biggest publishers on the open web. They even have a pet name for it. "We kind of made up the term Google Zero internally," Vogel said.
And yet. Total digital revenue went up 2%. Licensing revenue went up 49%. And part of that licensing line, as CFO Tim Quinn put it, "of course, is AI licenses."
The clicks left. The machines showed up with checkbooks. If you build links for a living, or buy them, that's the most important earnings call you'll ignore this year.
The numbers, straight off the call
- Nearly 70% of Google search traffic lost "over the last few years" (Vogel)
- Web sessions down 26% year over year, worse than the 22% drop last quarter, "primarily due to declines in Google referrals" (Vogel)
- AI Overviews on "over 90%" of the Google searches they track (Quinn). The earnings slide said 82%, per PPC Land. Pick your number. Either way it's most of them.
- Digital ads down 8%, which Quinn tied directly to the session decline
- Licensing revenue up 49%, driven by distribution partners like Apple News plus AI licenses, including a Meta AI deal announced last Q4
- Total digital revenue up 2% (Vogel)
And People Inc. isn't alone. Three days later, Ziff Davis told investors its Google organic referrals fell about 37% in a year, while its content got cited in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode roughly 2.7 billion times in the quarter. Two of the biggest publishers on the internet, one week, same story.
Two currencies, one Allrecipes article
Here's what a link from an Allrecipes article paid you in 2019: some referral traffic, and a ranking signal.
Here's what it pays you now:
- Referral clicks: less. A lot less. That's the currency People Inc. just showed you crashing.
- Rankings: same as ever. Google didn't stop reading links when it stopped sending clicks. And Google still owns the traffic. Ahrefs data for October, across 118,671 sites, had Google sending 24.74% of tracked referral traffic and ChatGPT sending 0.36% (via SEJ). Rankings still pay the bills.
- AI citations: new, and growing. That article is now being read by AI Overviews on 90%+ of the queries it used to win, and the publisher is licensing its content to AI companies. If your brand is in that article, your brand is in what the machine reads.
That's Two Currencies. A good link pays in rankings AND AI citations. What it doesn't pay in much anymore is clicks, which, let's be honest, were always the least reliable of the three.
One honest caveat, because we're not in the business of making stuff up. Nobody has published data showing a brand mentioned in a licensed article gets cited more because of that license. People Inc. doesn't break out AI revenue, and these deals cover content, not your brand specifically. What we do know is simpler. AI systems read publisher content. Publishers are getting paid for it. And AI answers keep citing the sources other trusted sources point to. That last part has a name. It's called a link.
The part that should change how you buy links
If you've been buying links for referral traffic, stop. That's the currency People Inc. just told you is collapsing.
If you've been buying cheap links on sites nobody would ever license, also stop. Nobody is writing Meta a check for a PBN. The publishers getting paid are the ones with real audiences and real editorial standards. Those are the links that pay in both currencies.
Quinn said one more thing on the call that link builders should tape to their monitor:
"There is increasingly a place for recency, meaning new content in that marketplace."
The AI licensing market wants fresh content. Fresh content is news. News is what journalists write when somebody hands them a real story with real data.
That's digital PR. That's literally the job.
What to do about it
- Judge a link by who reads the page, not who clicks it. A link on a page Google trusts and AI reads is worth more today than it was in 2023, even if it sends fewer clicks.
- Be the new content. Recency matters in the AI marketplace. A data story that lands in the news this month is what gets read, licensed and cited. That's what our Media Blitz is built for: original data, distributed to 150 to 200 news outlets, earned coverage that pays twice.
- Stop grading links on referral traffic. Track rankings. Track AI mentions. Treat the clicks as a tip, not the paycheck.
People Inc. lost 70% of its Google traffic and still grew its digital revenue. Its content didn't lose value. It changed who pays for it.
Your links work the same way. They didn't lose value. They changed currency.
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