DataReportal: web traffic down more than 10% since ChatGPT launched.

Total monthly traffic to the world's top 10,000 web domains has fallen by more than 10% since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, DataReportal reports. Time spent on those sites is down by close to 16% over the same period.

The analysis, 'Digital 2027: The Steady Decline of the World Wide Web' by Simon Kemp, was published on 21 October and draws on Similarweb data. Traffic is about 6.8% lower than two years ago and total time spent is down 11.2%, a loss of more than 6.6 billion hours a month, even though pages viewed per visit rose from 6.54 to 7.18. Visits to search engines in the top 10,000 fell 4.3% over two years, and GWI's survey shows 80.3% of internet users aged 16 and over used a search engine in the past month in the second quarter of 2026, against 82.8% two years earlier.

The losses are uneven. Visits to news and media sites fell from more than 56 billion a month in late 2022 to more than 36 billion in the second quarter of 2026, and sites carrying Google AdSense ads lost 14.8% of their visits and 21.1% of their time spent over two years. Traffic is also concentrating: the top 20 domains now take 44.1% of all visits to the top 10,000, up from 39.4% in late 2022, and google.com alone takes 20.9%.

Kemp does not blame AI alone. He sees the growing use of native mobile apps as the more likely main cause and expects AI to speed up the shift, but the report does not measure traffic lost to AI answers directly, and it has no figures for Saudi Arabia, the UAE or the wider region.

He still argues that brand websites should remain a primary consideration in the marketing mix, even though the share of online adults who say they visit them has slipped from 46.1% to 42.7% in two years. For brands and publishers in the Gulf, that points to judging websites on the quality of visits rather than their number, and putting product information inside the apps, social platforms and AI tools where people now spend their time.