Part 1.5: More Interesting Data Coming Out About Crash in Organic Traffic...

While we're waiting for Part 2, some more data shows us a path out?

Our ‘Part I: Organic traffic is crashing’ post surfaced what was going on at HubSpot and what was the talk of the town - inbound traffic was on a substantial decline.

Parts 2-4 are on the way - the most important aspect, remediation. Until then we wanted to share some more data that has come out since then.

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Mounting Organic Traffic Crisis

Back in part 1, we showed the traffic chart for HubSpot’s blog traffic. Since then folks have been using other tools, such as SEMRush to see what’s going on with other companies.

Perhaps heaviest hit is Chegg. They sell textbooks, but their biggest organic traffic is their user generated content (UGC) where they have subscribers pay to get answers to homework questions and other subscribers contribute. Let’s check in on Chegg:

You are reading this right, Chegg went from a traffic peak of 24m monthly visitors to 6 - a 75% plummet that really mainly happened in the last 60 days.

What happened? In this example, I doubt it was the Google core algo changes, this one is 100% Gemini results in SERPs and the rise of chatgpt and other LLMs. Why pay for Chegg when you get homework answers for free?

Chegg has filed a lawsuit on Google over this, claiming that the AI snippets are basically Chegg’s answers without attribution/citation.