#web-traffic

#web-traffic

New data is reinforcing a structural shift in how AI systems access publisher content: AI models are increasingly scraping publisher content, regardless of bot-blocking measures or content licensing deals meant to control usage, improve attribution or drive referral traffic. New research from analytics firms and bot-tracking companies shows AI tools are increasingly crawling publisher sites as inputs for AI-generated summaries and training, while sending back only limited referral traffic.

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After launching almost three years ago, Meta's Threads is now reportedly attracting more daily mobile users than rival platform X. According to Similarweb data shared by TechCrunch, Threads has 141.5 million daily active iOS and Android global app users as of January 7th, compared to 125 million users for Elon Musk's mobile platform. Similarweb reports that Threads actually overtook X sometime between late October and early November after a consistent period of growth, meaning this milestone wasn't suddenly achieved in reaction to recent Grok-related controversies.

"The great patron of the internet for the last 27 years was Google. The great villain of the internet today is also Google," Prince said. He claimed that in the past, for every two pages that Google crawled to inform its search engine, it would, on average, send one visitor to those sites-traffic that publishers can monetise with advertising.

In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content "responsibly" by ensuring its contributions are properly attributed and that content is accessed through its paid product, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform. The opt-in, paid product allows companies to use Wikipedia's content at scale without "severely taxing Wikipedia's servers," the Wikimedia Foundation blog post explains.

X's new link experiment on iOS may be artificially inflating traffic. Websites like Substack and Bluesky noticed a sharp increase in "fake" views following the update, something that Nick Eubanks, the VP of owned media at the digital marketing platform Semrush, attributes to a new behavior that preloads content before users click on it. "What's happening here is a classic case of metrics distortion caused by product experimentation at the platform layer," Eubanks tells The Verge.

Google remains unrivaled in online traffic, with an astounding monthly total of 105.4 billion visits, solidifying its position as the most popular website globally.