The disaster of websites facing a steep decline in internet traffic has reached a crescendo.
In the Financial Times, Conde Nast publisher Roger Lynch waves the white flag with Google, which has ravaged the search function by introducing AI summaries.
Lynch calls what’s happened “another sort of death blow.”
“We assume very dramatic continued declines in search traffic, to the point where in a couple of years it’s just not a meaningful driver of our traffic,” Lynch said.
He doesn’t explain where he’s getting traffic from because every month is more challenging than the last.
Admitting the death of internet traffic is probably the beginning of something good. Lynch does say Conde Nast is doing better than ever. But no one really knows because company is private and doesn’t report numbers.
Still, you can tell from looking at the available numbers on Semrush.com. Vanityfair.com dropped precipitously over December and January. Visits to the site were down a staggering 33%. Was the content suddenly so poor? Or was it that Google screws with algorithm every month, sometimes twice a month, with notice or regulation? They call these changes Core Updates, but what they are is punitive measures that eat into revenue arbitrarily.
Even Vogue.com is suffering, and they’re the biggest of the Conde Nast magazines (apart from The New Yorker, a separate entity at the company). even though Vogue was up by 3% in December/January, the site was way off from October 2025.
And people wonder why the Associated Press, the Guardian, and many sites including this one have “donate” or “contribute” buttons on their sites. Keeping a website going is no easy feat right now.
Vanity Fair:
