Pulp Nonfiction

“Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb. Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication ‘endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.’ Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb. At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model.” The numbers are dramatic, but the trend makes sense when you consider that people have stopped searching for links and started searching for AI answers. WSJ (Gift Article): News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools. Of course, it’s not just news sites. It’s all sites. The internet is enabling the AI that that will replace it. To paraphrase Bruce Willis’s Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction, “Web’s dead, baby. Web’s dead.”