The open web isn’t dying, but it is being rebuilt around a different traffic source. People Inc. told Digiday that session-based revenue fell from 61% to 57% of total digital revenue between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026. Core sessions dropped 22% and Google search traffic fell 40%, both year-over-year. Non-session revenue — subscriptions, licensing, commerce, creator monetization — grew 16% year-over-year, rising from 39% to 43% of the total. Jon Roberts, People Inc.’s chief innovation officer, put the strategic shift plainly: “If you want to grow, you want to be more than an open web business,” while adding the company isn’t abandoning search traffic outright — “We will always be an open web business… And we will also build on other platforms.”
A Brainlabs study across 54 clients backs the same pattern from a different angle. Organic search traffic fell 10.5% after AI Overviews became widespread. AI platform referrals rose 163%, and AI-driven conversions — purchases, sign-ups — jumped 335%. Fewer visits, converting far better, from a source publishers barely monetized a year ago.
The numbers in this piece
01Why this matters for publishers and buyers
| Session volume is no longer the whole scoreboard | A publisher whose GAM/AdX stack is still tuned purely for pageview volume is optimizing for the shrinking half of the business; the growing half (subscriptions, licensing, AI referral value) barely touches traditional ad inventory today. |
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| The AI Overviews trade is asymmetric, and that's the operator story | Raptive's chief strategy officer Paul Bannister named the real risk: "The algorithm can deprioritize you tomorrow and effectively, you're dead." Traffic sourced from one ranking system, with no owned-audience backstop, is not a durable yield base. |
| Non-search platforms are becoming real distribution, not just brand exposure | The Athletic generated 50 million views from sports creator video alone. Owned-format content built for a specific platform can out-earn passive search referral at scale. |
| Forbes is naming the harder question out loud | Chief innovation officer Nina Gould asked: "How can we subsidize high quality, authoritative, trustworthy content when traditional models are disrupted very quickly and new ones aren't catching up?" — a question every yield operator should be asking about their own inventory mix, not just editorial. |
02What publishers should do
03The bottom line
None of this is a search-traffic collapse story anymore — it’s a monetization-mix story, and the publishers ahead of it (People Inc., The Athletic, Forbes) are the ones treating non-session revenue as a first-class yield category rather than a hedge. For any operator running GAM/AdX, the open web’s post-traffic era isn’t a reason to panic about volume; it’s a reason to stop pricing every session the same way.