The biggest casualty so far is Business Insider, which saw its monthly visits nosedive by 48.5 per cent between 2024 and 2025. The once-mighty source of listicles, gossip and market blather fell from 13.4 million to just 6.9 million visits in a single year, as readers decided it was quicker to ask ChatGPT for a summary than to wade through yet another “10 signs you’re a future billionaire” piece. Searches for the site also dropped from 1.9 million to 1.3 million.
WebMD came second, losing 43.1 per cent of its visitors as people now ask AI about their weird rashes and headaches rather than scrolling through alarming symptom checklists. Monthly visits fell from 122 million to 69.5 million, while searches for the site slid by 15.2 per cent.
The once-essential Dictionary.com took third place with a 37.3 per cent drop in traffic and a 36.6 per cent fall in searches, proof that users now prefer AI to define words directly in chat rather than opening another tab.
Stack Overflow, the long-time haunt of caffeine-fuelled developers, dropped 35.6 per cent as coders now turn to AI models that can write and debug code instantly. The site’s search traffic fell by roughly a third, which probably suits those tired of copy-pasted answers from 2014.
Unsplash came fifth, losing 34 per cent of its monthly users as AI tools learned to generate bespoke images without anyone needing to browse a stock photo site. Investopedia followed with a 33.2 per cent decline as retail investors now prefer AI’s instant explanations of P/E ratios and credit default swaps.
Even Google’s own Translate took a beating, with a 32.7 per cent traffic drop as chatbots built translation directly into their responses. Quora saw a 28.1 per cent decline as users realised they could get a straight answer from AI without scrolling through paragraphs of self-promotion.
CNN slipped 19.1 per cent as users now prefer AI to summarise the day’s news instead of visiting the network’s increasingly ad-clogged homepage. Chegg, once the go-to for student homework help, lost 18.8 per cent of its users and more than half of its search volume as students embraced AI tutors instead.
A spokesperson from Loopex Digital said the findings show “how quickly user behaviour is evolving as people turn to AI for instant answers.” They added that businesses and publishers will have to adapt fast “to maintain visibility and meet users where they are.”
If current trends continue, website traffic across the board could fall by more than 50 per cent by 2028. That means the content farms and SEO spammers who ruled the last decade may soon be out of a job replaced by a handful of AI chat tools that never need a coffee break, never sleep and never ask for a click-through rate.