Email and Paid Search Are Growing as Organic Search Shrinks

As organic search shrinks, two channels are picking up the slack: email and paid search. Search Engine Land reported on November 4 on an analysis by Kevin Indig using Similarweb data, comparing January to August 2026 with the same months in 2025. Email visits grew 16.3% in the US and 17.0% in France; paid search grew 20.8% and 20.3% respectively. In absolute terms, email added 3.94 billion additional US visits, against 3.70 billion from paid search. Over the longer window, August 2024 to August 2026, organic traffic fell 13% in the US and 24% in France, while inflation eroded about 6% of a dollar's purchasing power over the same period.

The numbers behind the shift

The paid search figure needs a caveat. Excluding googleadservices.com — one domain with an outsized effect — paid search growth falls to 13.5% in the US and 10.7% in France. On a narrowed sample of 1,896 domains, paid search grows 21.0% in the US and email 20.5%. Whichever cut you use, the direction is the same: the two channels are growing at double-digit rates while organic declines.

Direct traffic, the largest channel by volume at 43.5% of visits for the median US site, held up better than organic: it fell 3.4% in the US from August 2024 to August 2026, while organic fell 13.2%. The picture is not a collapse of the web — it is a redistribution. Traffic is moving from search toward channels that brands own or buy directly.

AI assistants are the new direct channel

The most striking detail in the analysis is where direct traffic is growing. Claude.ai's average daily direct visits grew 990% in the US and 1,474.7% in France from January 2025 to August 2026. Brave, TikTok, Pinterest and Canva also grew direct visits in both markets. Much of that AI-assistant traffic arrives without a referrer, so it logs as direct — which means the direct channel is quietly absorbing the AI-search shift.

That matters because it changes how the decline in organic should be read. Some of the traffic that used to arrive via Google now arrives via an AI assistant and gets counted as direct. The user still came from a search-like interaction; the analytics just cannot see it. Brands that only watch organic search will underestimate how much of their audience still finds them through AI-mediated discovery.

Why it matters for SEOs and link builders

The strategic lesson is diversification, but not panic. Organic search is shrinking, not disappearing, and it remains a major channel. The growth in email — a channel brands own outright — is the strongest argument for building a list from the traffic search still sends. Every organic visitor who joins an email list becomes a visitor you no longer need Google to deliver.

For link builders, the shift raises the value of the link itself. A link from a trusted site does not just pass ranking signals; it sends referral traffic that bypasses Google entirely, and it puts a brand in front of the AI assistants that cite it. In a world where organic shrinks and email and paid grow, the earned link is one of the few assets that feeds all three: it helps rankings, it drives direct visits, and it builds the mentions AI search relies on.

The analysis also carries a warning about reading channel data too literally. Email's 16.3% growth and paid search's 20.8% growth are real, but they are partly a consequence of the same shift they are measured against: as organic shrinks, brands invest more in the channels they control, and those channels grow because of the investment as well as because of the audience's behaviour. The causality runs both ways, and the honest reading is that brands are adapting to a smaller organic pie by baking bigger pies elsewhere. The adaptation is rational, and the data shows it working — but it does not mean organic is finished. It means the mix is changing, and the brands that manage the mix deliberately will do better than the ones that simply mourn the channel that shrank.

Sources

Sources: Search Engine Land, November 4, 2026, based on Similarweb data analysed by Kevin Indig.

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