AI displacing traffic? Time to leverage your most undervalued channel.

The rules of search have changed.

Marketing funnels aren’t meant to stall. You pour hours into creating content, refining workflows, optimizing landing pages, and protecting brand consistency. How can all that effort, content, and creativity go to waste?

But your funnel feels it. The uncomfortable truth is that even the strongest funnel can’t save you if a large portion of your audience never sees your work.

• SEO is flatlining. 
• AI-generated summaries are pushing your branded content aside. 
• The metrics start to tell a story you don’t want to hear, one that makes it look like you don’t even have a marketing team.

Even if you keep pace with endless design iterations, fresh ideas, and new product releases, the odds of your audience seeing that work continue to shrink.

The new reality

Organic website traffic once acted like steady foot traffic to your business. People found you simply because you sat on the “main road” of search. 

That reality is gone.

Gartner expects search engine traffic to drop 25%. But fewer searches don’t automatically mean fewer purchases. 

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are reshaping how traffic reaches websites. As users ask more purposeful questions, AI increasingly answers them without sending people to the content, guides, and product pages your teams worked hard to build. 

For B2B SaaS companies, marketing platforms, and content-heavy businesses, this shift is no longer a small optimization issue. It’s a structural change.

• Roughly 60% of searches now end without a click, as AI-generated answers satisfy users directly on the results page, according to Bain.
• Google’s AI Overviews can push top-ranked links down by as much as 1,500 pixels. That’s roughly two full screen scrolls on desktop and three on mobile, sharply reducing click-through rates even for top-performing pages.
• When an AI Overview appears, sites that once ranked first can lose up to 79% of their traffic for that query, The Guardian found.
• Users are more likely to end their session after seeing a search page with an AI summary than after visiting one without it, according to Pew Research.
• Whether or not an AI summary appeared, most Google searches in the study still ended without a click. Users either stayed within Google or left entirely. Roughly two-thirds of all searches resulted in one of these outcomes.

Replacing those lost sessions takes far more than boosted posts or small SEO tweaks. It demands a full acquisition engine across multiple channels, each replacing only a fraction of what search once delivered for free. 

To respond, businesses must build a diversified system that doesn’t depend on a single platform’s algorithm. That shift also forces a reevaluation of marketing spend, often at a much higher cost.

Historically, paid digital channels like paid social, native ads, search, and display could recover about 40% to 45% of lost traffic. Owned media such as email, video, webinars, and guest content could deliver another 25% to 30% while compounding long-term value. The rest had to come from partnerships, marketplaces, events, outbound efforts, and emerging channels, each contributing incremental gains.

This diversified approach exposes the real cost of traffic displacement. 

Recovering lost sessions at scale means running 20-plus channels at once, backed by more talent, better tools, and sustained investment as each program matures. Even conservatively, a Year 1 plan can require nearly $1.89 million in annual spend, stabilizing at roughly $225,000 per month.

Leveraging the undervalued channel

There’s one line item in your marketing plan that AI hasn’t touched: your owned audience. While every other channel carries a market-rate cost your competitors can match, your email list is exclusively yours.

Email is the one channel where you control distribution, timing, and message. In a world of unpredictable platform algorithms, those owned contacts aren’t just valuable. They’re essential for survival.

Still, many businesses make the mistake of assuming email scales linearly. It doesn’t. 

Sending more messages doesn’t guarantee more engagement or more sessions. Sustainable email growth demands a smarter, more disciplined approach. 

High-performing programs rely on:

• Segmentation grounded in real audience behavior.
• Optimized send frequency that protects engagement while expanding reach.
• Clear performance benchmarks that show whether results are improving or slipping.
• Tactical insights that pinpoint which actions actually drive lift.

Many teams struggle because they’re missing one or more of these foundations. Without them, email turns into a guessing game. Done right, email becomes the base layer for scalable growth.

The difference between programs that grow and those that stall is simple:

• Plateaued teams send more emails and hope for better results. 
• Scaled teams use real-time benchmarks and tactical guidance to improve every send with intention and consistency.

Harness the power of an email solution built for you

Campaign Monitor offers a modern email infrastructure that treats email as the strategic asset it is. With AI-driven capabilities like Marketing Monitor, it goes beyond being an email platform. It becomes an in-app performance partner that removes guesswork and drives smarter decisions.

For example, the newly introduced Marketing Monitor provides:

• Industry benchmark comparisons that show how your open, click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe rates compare across industries.
  • Why this matters: When you’re scaling email from 2,000 to 7,500 sessions per month, you need to know whether an 18% open rate is strong or signals room to improve. Marketing Monitor shows exactly where you stand and where to focus.
• Goal-based recommendations that let you choose an objective — such as increasing engagement, reducing bounces, or improving clicks — and receive proven tactics to reach it.
  • Why this matters: Marketing Monitor acts as an in-app strategic partner, highlighting what’s working, what isn’t, and which tactics to test next.
• Real-time results tracking that reveals how recent changes impact performance.
  • Why this matters: When you adjust your email strategy, you need fast feedback. If you’re investing in expansion, iteration cycles must be measured in days, not quarters.

The right email solution can be the difference between a 2% click rate and a 4% click rate — and tens of thousands of dollars in traffic you earn for free.

The bottom line

Losing 10,000 monthly sessions to AI-driven search shifts isn’t just a traffic hit. It’s a business model disruption that:

• Threatens your pipeline.
• Slows growth.
• Erodes long-term competitiveness. 

You have two choices: absorb the decline or build a diversified marketing strategy that isn’t controlled by an algorithm.

Replacing lost sessions will likely require a shift in budget allocation, but the alternative costs far more. Companies that act now — by strengthening their owned audience, modernizing email programs, and broadening their channel mix — are the ones best positioned to stabilize and grow.

Your email list, your content, your customer relationships, and your partnerships are assets you control. When you nurture them, they compound in value. 

In an AI-first world where third-party platforms decide what people see, owning your channels isn’t optional. It’s the foundation of resilience, growth, and long-term survival.

“How to win against declining traffic: A flight path to rebuilding reach” breaks down what it really takes to replace 120,000 lost sessions.

Get the complete flight plan.