Chegg Just Lost 99% of Its Value to AI Search. Here’s What Four More Months of Data Say About Your UK Business.

In April we told you HubSpot lost 140 million website visits in a year and gave you twelve tactics to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to you (read the original piece). Four months on, we went back to check whether that was a one-off horror story or the start of a pattern.

It’s a pattern. And it’s accelerating faster than most UK business owners realise.

Since April, an American ed-tech company has lost 99 percent of its market value and cut nearly half its staff. A newsroom with 100 million monthly readers cut a fifth of its workforce and blamed “traffic drops outside of our control.” ChatGPT added 300 million weekly users in seven months. And a UK-specific audit of over 31,000 business websites found that seven in ten are, right now, effectively invisible to the AI tools their customers are using to find them.

None of this is theoretical any more. This is what the data says has actually happened, with every figure sourced to the company, the analyst, or the journalist who reported it.

Did search really “die”? What the new data actually shows

Back in February 2024, the analyst firm Gartner made the prediction that started this whole conversation: traditional search engine volume would drop 25 percent by 2026 as AI chatbots and virtual agents replaced it (Gartner, February 2024). 2026 is now the year the prediction was supposed to come true. So did it?

At the aggregate level, no. Search Engine Land’s analysis of the top 40,000 US websites, using data from Graphite and Similarweb, found overall organic search traffic down just 2.5 percent year over year, with total search engine traffic actually up 0.4 percent in 2025 and Google’s own traffic up 0.8 percent (Search Engine Land, 20 January 2026). Google isn’t dying. Search isn’t dying. Anyone telling you search traffic has collapsed 25 percent across the board is wrong.

But averages hide the real story, and the real story is ugly if you’re the wrong kind of website. That same Search Engine Land analysis found AI Overviews now appear on roughly 30 percent of queries and cut click-through rates by 35 percent when they do. And the pain isn’t evenly spread: the largest ten sites in the study actually grew organic traffic by 1.6 percent, while the declines were “concentrated among mid-sized publishers ranked roughly between the top 100 and 10,000.” Translation: if you’re not a dominant brand with massive existing authority, you’re in the group that’s losing.

It gets worse when you look at click-through rate rather than raw traffic. Search Engine Land’s coverage of Seer Interactive’s ongoing tracking study — 3,119 informational queries across 42 organisations, measured from June 2024 to September 2025 using Google Search Console and Google Ads data — found organic click-through rate down 61 percent on queries where an AI Overview appears, from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent. Paid click-through rate fell even further, down 68 percent, from 19.7 percent to 6.34 percent. And critically, even queries without an AI Overview present saw organic CTR fall 41 percent, to 1.62 percent (Search Engine Land, citing Seer Interactive). AI is changing how people click even when it isn’t directly in front of them.

There is one number in that study that should be printed out and stuck above every UK business owner’s desk: brands mentioned inside an AI Overview received 35 percent more organic clicks and 91 percent more paid clicks than brands that weren’t mentioned at all. Being cited isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s close to a 2x advantage over your competitor who isn’t.

So the honest reality check on Gartner’s prediction is this: the 25 percent collapse hasn’t happened to search as a whole, and it might never happen at that scale. But it is already happening, in exactly that magnitude and worse, to specific businesses — the ones that don’t get cited, the ones that rely on the queries AI has started answering directly, and the ones without the authority or structured signals to earn a mention. The prediction wasn’t wrong. It was just aimed at the wrong target. It’s not an industry-wide event. It’s a sorting mechanism, and it’s sorting businesses into winners and losers right now.

The casualties: what happens when you don’t adapt in time

Two companies made that sorting mechanism impossible to ignore this year.

Chegg, the US online homework-help and textbook company, is down 99 percent from its February 2021 all-time high — roughly $14.5 billion of market value gone (Forbes, 29 October 2025). The mechanism is brutally simple: students who used to pay Chegg for homework help now turn to ChatGPT instead. A Needham survey found the share of students who planned to use ChatGPT for schoolwork climbed from 43 percent to 62 percent, while planned use of Chegg fell from 38 percent to 30 percent over the same period. Non-subscriber traffic to Chegg’s site was down 49 percent by January 2025, up sharply from an 8 percent decline in Q2 2024 — the drop is accelerating, not levelling off. Chegg’s Q2 2025 revenue fell 23 percent to $105 million, with a $36.5 million operating loss. In October 2025 Chegg cut 45 percent of its remaining workforce, 388 people, the fourth layoff round since June 2024 and 1,396 jobs eliminated in total.

Business Insider cut 21 percent of its staff in May 2025, across every department, and its CEO Barbara Peng was unusually direct about why: “We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control, so we’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility” (Nieman Lab, 29 May 2025). The company said 70 percent of its business carries “some degree of traffic sensitivity” to exactly the kind of algorithm and AI Overview shifts we’ve just walked through. Tellingly, over 70 percent of Business Insider’s own staff were already using Enterprise ChatGPT regularly — the AI tool that was reshaping their traffic was also, by then, part of their own newsroom’s daily workflow.

Neither of these companies failed because their product got worse. Chegg’s homework help didn’t get less accurate and Business Insider’s journalism didn’t get worse overnight. They failed because the way people find answers changed underneath them, and they were structurally dependent on the old way. That’s the part every UK SMB owner should sit with. It’s not about being a bad business. It’s about whether your customers can still find you when they stop typing keywords into Google and start asking an AI a direct question.

Where the traffic actually went — and why it’s not just ChatGPT any more

Here’s the part of the story most “AI is eating search” commentary gets wrong: it treats AI as one platform. It isn’t, and the gap is closing fast.

ChatGPT itself is still growing hard. Sam Altman announced at OpenAI’s Dev Day that ChatGPT had passed 800 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March 2025 — 300 million additional weekly users added in about seven months (TechCrunch, 6 October 2025). API usage tells the same growth story from a different angle: OpenAI said it was processing over 6 billion tokens per minute on the API by that point.

But Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Landscape Report, published in July 2026, shows the market fragmenting under ChatGPT’s feet even as the overall pie grows. AI platforms collectively pulled in an average of 9.5 billion monthly web visits between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70 percent year over year, with 655 million unique monthly visitors, up 57 percent, and 4.4 billion app downloads, up 58 percent (Similarweb, July 2026). The category is genuinely exploding.

Within that growth, though, ChatGPT’s own share of AI platform traffic fell from roughly 76 percent in June 2025 to around 53 percent a year later — not because people are using ChatGPT less in absolute terms, but because Gemini and Claude are growing faster off a smaller base. Gemini rose from under 9 percent to around 27–28 percent of traffic, helped by Google folding it directly into Search, Android and Workspace. Claude’s share nearly quadrupled, from about 2 percent to close to 9 percent, with app monthly active users up roughly 1,318 percent year over year, driven largely by developers and power users.

The practical takeaway for a UK business: if your GEO strategy is “get cited by ChatGPT” and stops there, you’re optimising for a shrinking share of a growing pie. The businesses that will still be visible in eighteen months are the ones with the structured, well-sourced, authoritative content that gets cited across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and whatever Google’s AI Mode becomes — not the ones chasing one platform’s specific quirks.

The UK reality check: seven in ten businesses are already losing this before they’ve started

This is the number that should matter most to you, because it’s not American, it’s not enterprise, and it’s not hypothetical. SearchScore’s UK AI Search Visibility Report audited 31,152 UK business websites in its Q2 2026 edition and found an average AI visibility score of just 42.6 out of 100. Seventy-one percent of UK sites scored below 50. Only 336 sites — 1.1 percent of the total — reached the report’s “Strong” tier of 71–85. Not a single site in the sample reached the top “AI-Ready” tier of 86 and above (SearchScore, Q2 2026).

Sector performance varied but none of it was good. Health & Wellness led the pack, and even it only averaged 50.2. Finance & Accounting managed 49.4. Tech & Software sat at 45.1. Property & Automotive scored 43.1. Hospitality & Travel and Marketing Agencies came in lowest, at 42.1 and 40.8 respectively. Whatever sector you’re in, the honest reading of this data is that the average UK business — including, probably, several of your direct competitors — is currently invisible or close to it when a customer asks an AI tool for a recommendation.

That’s genuinely good news if you act on it, because a market where almost nobody is doing this properly is a market where doing it properly is a real competitive advantage, not table stakes. It won’t stay that way. Which brings us to where the money is already heading.

Why the smart money is already moving

While most UK SMBs haven’t started, enterprise marketing budgets are already reallocating hard toward exactly this problem. Conductor’s State of AEO/GEO 2026 CMO Investment Report, based on a survey of over 250 C-suite and senior marketing leaders at enterprises with 500-plus employees across more than a dozen industries, found that 97 percent said answer engine optimisation had a positive impact on their marketing funnel in 2025, and 94 percent plan to increase that investment again in 2026 (Conductor, updated 14 April 2026). On average these enterprises already devote 12 percent of their digital marketing budget to AEO/GEO, and 56 percent describe their 2025 investment as “significant or high-level.” The same report found AI-search-originated traffic converting at double the rate of conventional organic traffic, and doing it in a third of the sessions — roughly two-thirds fewer sessions needed to get there.

Enterprise marketing teams move slowly and expensively, and they’ve already concluded this is worth 12 percent of the budget. UK SMBs, who move faster and cheaper, mostly haven’t started at all. That gap won’t last.

What this means for your business over the next 90 days

We covered twelve detailed tactics in April — question-first content, schema, FAQ blocks, llms.txt, structured citations and the rest (the full playbook is here) — and that playbook hasn’t changed. What this round of data adds is a sense of urgency and priority. Three things specifically.

Find out your actual score before you guess. With the UK average sitting at 42.6 out of 100 and 71 percent of sites below 50, “we have a nice website” tells you nothing about whether AI tools can find and cite you. Run our free GEO audit tool against your own site this week. If you score anywhere near the UK average, you have real, quantifiable ground to make up — and now you know exactly where.

Build for more than one AI engine. The Similarweb data is clear that no single platform will dominate AI search the way Google dominated traditional search. Structured data — schema markup, FAQPage blocks, clean llms.txt files, consistent business information across directories — is what gets read the same way by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google’s AI Mode alike. Platform-specific hacks age badly. Structural fundamentals compound.

Move now, while the average is still this low. A UK market where the average competitor scores 42.6 out of 100 is a market where getting to 70 or 80 is genuinely achievable and genuinely differentiating. Enterprise marketers already know this, which is why 94 percent of them are increasing AEO investment this year. The SMB opportunity window that we flagged in April is still open. Every month that passes, it gets a little narrower, as more of your competitors run their own free audit and start fixing what it finds.

The honest summary

Four months ago the headline was one company, HubSpot, losing 140 million visits. Today it’s Chegg losing 99 percent of its value, Business Insider cutting a fifth of its staff, and 71 percent of UK businesses scoring below 50 out of 100 on AI visibility. The pattern isn’t slowing down. It’s just spreading from headline-grabbing US giants to the ordinary UK businesses reading this article right now.

The reassuring part of the data is real too: overall search traffic is roughly flat, Google isn’t disappearing, and the businesses that get cited by AI are seeing a genuine, measurable advantage over the ones that don’t — up to 91 percent more clicks in Seer Interactive’s numbers. This isn’t an extinction event for anyone willing to adapt. It’s a sorting mechanism, and right now most of your competitors are still sorting themselves into the wrong pile.

We build GEO-strong websites for UK businesses from the ground up, and we run the ongoing optimisation that keeps them cited as AI search keeps evolving. Run the free audit, see where you stand, and if you want help closing the gap, that’s exactly what we’re for.

Sources and further reading

1. Gartner. “Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents.” Press release, 19 February 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents
2. Goodwin, Danny. “Organic search traffic is down 2.5% YoY, new data shows.” Search Engine Land, 20 January 2026. https://searchengineland.com/organic-search-traffic-down-yoy-data-467748
3. “Google AI Overviews drive 61% drop in organic CTR, 68% in paid,” citing Seer Interactive research (June 2024–September 2025 update). Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-drive-drop-organic-paid-ctr-464212
4. Cohan, Peter. “Chegg Stock Down 99%. Learn Whether AI, 45% Layoffs Make $CHGG A Buy.” Forbes, 29 October 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2025/10/29/chegg-stock-down-99-learn-whether-ai-45-layoffs-make-chgg-a-buy/
5. “Business Insider will lay off 21% of staff amid AI disruption and ‘extreme traffic drops outside of our control.’” Nieman Journalism Lab, 29 May 2025. https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/05/business-insider-will-lay-off-21-of-staff-amid-ai-disruption-and-extreme-traffic-drops-outside-of-our-control/
6. “Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users.” TechCrunch, 6 October 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/sam-altman-says-chatgpt-has-hit-800m-weekly-active-users/
7. “AI Search Stats 2026: Market Share, Referral, and Citation Trends,” 2026 Generative AI Landscape Report. Similarweb, July 2026. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/marketing/geo/gen-ai-stats/
8. “UK AI Search Visibility Report – Q2 2026.” SearchScore. https://searchscore.io/savi-report/uk-april-2026/
9. “The State of AEO/GEO in 2026: CMO Investment Report.” Conductor, updated 14 April 2026. https://www.conductor.com/academy/state-of-aeo-geo-report/