The Ziff Davis group announced that visits to its sites from Google search declined by approximately 37% year-on-year in the third quarter. During the earnings call on November 6, its CEO, Vivek Shah, also cited a figure for Google AI-related impressions, used to compare this decline to the company’s search engine activity.
According to Vivek Shah, traffic from Google had already decreased by about 23% in the same quarter the previous year, bringing the two-year decline to over 50%. He stated that Ziff Davis does not foresee “a recovery in search” and expects this decline to continue. Third-quarter revenue was $289.3 million, down 5.6%, a more modest decrease which he attributes to activities not reliant on Google traffic, such as subscriptions and apps.
Impressions to compare with clicks
The figure of 2.7 billion refers to impressions, i.e., the number of times a link to a page was displayed. According to Vivek Shah, these impressions, generated by the group’s sites for Google’s AI Overviews and AI mode, represent nearly ten times “the clicks those same sites received from Google Search.” This data comes from Search Console, the tracking tool Google provides to site publishers. According to Google’s definitions, this generative AI performance report counts link appearances in AI Overviews and AI mode, which are part of overall search data.
The problem lies in the denominator. According to Google’s help documentation on click counting, a click on a link within an AI Overview or in AI mode counts towards the site’s total clicks. Vivek Shah did not specify during the call where his total clicks figure came from. If it refers to all clicks from Google search, then the report compares AI-related impressions to all search clicks. As of November 8, Google does not document a separate click counter for AI.
More resilient activities
Vivek Shah cites “the disruption of search traffic by Google and LLMs”, large language models, as a lasting drag on the business. He believes the group’s technology and shopping brands remain the most exposed to this decline. Revenue for this segment, at $82 million, fell 3.8% year-on-year, and this decline has narrowed for three consecutive quarters, according to the executive.
The site IGN, the top property in terms of search traffic, is holding up better, notably thanks to game help content, according to Vivek Shah. However, video game and entertainment revenue declined by 2.1%, a drop he attributes to an unfavorable advertising environment in the sector ahead of the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.
Regarding content used by AIs, Vivek Shah indicated that monetizing its content in generated responses was “the priority”, and that the group is open to licensing deals. He believes the ongoing lawsuit by Ziff Davis against OpenAI will help clarify this area, and stresses that “there is a gap between usage and monetization”.
