People Inc., the publisher behind PEOPLE, Allrecipes and Investopedia, told investors on its third-quarter earnings call that referral traffic from Google Search has fallen about 70% over the past two years. Chief executive Neil Vogel said the lost visits are gone for good, as AI Overviews now appear at the top of more than 90% of the Google searches tied to the company's content. Core sessions across its 19 biggest sites fell 26% in the quarter, the steepest drop the publisher has ever reported.
The quarter in numbers
The session numbers show the decline speeding up. Core sessions — visits to its 19 biggest sites — came to 1.61 billion in the third quarter, down from 2.17 billion a year earlier. The fall was 17% in the first quarter and 22% in the second, making the 26% drop the third step in a quickening slide.
Google is named as the cause. People Inc. said the drop in programmatic advertising came from lower impression volumes driven by the 26% session decline, due primarily to AI-oriented search and content discovery experiences. Its earnings presentation put AI Overviews penetration at 82% for the quarter, and chief financial officer Tim Quinn told the call it had since passed 90%.
The money held up better than the traffic. Digital revenue rose 2% to $288.5 million, the twelfth consecutive quarter of growth, while advertising fell 8% to $161.9 million. Licensing revenue jumped 49% to $52.7 million, helped by content deals with Apple News and AI companies. Session-based revenue fell 6%, a much smaller drop than sessions themselves.
The pattern is familiar across publishing. AI Overviews now appear on more than 80% of Google searches, and People Inc.'s tracking puts the figure above 90% for the queries that once sent it traffic. The company said most of its traffic arrives directly or from sources other than Google, a shift that would have been unthinkable two years ago.
“Google Zero”
Vogel framed the loss as permanent. “We've lost nearly 70% of our Google search traffic over the last few years,” he said, adding that AI Overviews are now over 90% of the queries that used to send it traffic from search. “That traffic is gone, and it isn't coming back,” he said. People Inc. coined “Google Zero” years ago.
Chairman Barry Diller called it a “critical loss of sessions” on the call. The company laid off 195 employees last week, about 6% of its staff, as the traffic loss fed through. Yet management insisted the worst is behind it, saying the biggest referral drops are over — a claim about the future, not a fact from the quarter.
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People Inc. is the biggest publisher yet to put a number on the AI search bill, and its number dwarfs the one Ziff Davis reported days earlier: a 37% fall in Google referrals in a single quarter, against People Inc.'s 70% over two years. The two reports together show the damage is industry-wide, not a single publisher's problem.
The cruelest detail is the visibility paradox. People Inc.'s content is cited in AI answers more than ever — AI Overviews sit on 90% of its tracked queries — yet those citations send almost no visitors. Being read by the answer is not being visited, and an impression in an AI answer counts the showing, not the click.
The response across publishing is already visible. Reddit's shares fell after it warned that Google referrals were drying up, and publishers are choosing between licensing their content to AI companies, gating it behind logins, or accepting a smaller web audience. People Inc. is doing all three at once.
What should worry publishers is the timeline. In May 2025, People Inc.'s core sessions were down only 3% and AI Overviews appeared on about a third of its related searches. Eighteen months later the overviews cover 90% and sessions are down 26%. The shift did not arrive gradually — it accelerated, quarter by quarter.
Why It Matters
For publishers, the message is that the search-traffic model is finished as a growth engine, even for the biggest brands. People Inc. survived the quarter because non-session revenue — licensing, events, apps and content deals — now supplies 43% of its digital revenue, up 15% in the quarter. Publishers without that cushion face traffic loss with no replacement income.
For readers, the shift is quieter but just as real. When answers are served on the results page, fewer people reach the sites that wrote them — and some publishers are responding by putting more content behind logins and paywalls. The open web gets thinner as the answers get thicker.
For Google, the stakes are legal as well as commercial. People Inc. said it still hopes for a nine-figure damages payout in its ad tech antitrust lawsuit against Google, with USA Today's case moving first. A court payout may be the last big check the publisher gets from Google for a long time.
Background
People Inc. is the publishing business of People Incorporated, the holding company formerly known as IAC; the publishing arm was formerly called Dotdash Meredith. It owns more than 40 brands, including PEOPLE, Allrecipes and Investopedia, and reported its third-quarter results on 2 November, holding the earnings call the next day.
Source: AdExchanger's report on the earnings call and PPC Land's breakdown of the results
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