It used to be “how do I get more traffic?” Now it’s “how do I earn more from the users I still have?” I heard it at Digiday in September, and it kept coming up after.

Publishers have already absorbed one round of search referral loss. The CRO of a major premium publisher told me he’s planning to lose another 20% to 30% of his search traffic to AI summaries, on top of what’s already gone. He wasn’t the only one. I heard forecasts in that range from several publishers this fall.

Chartbeat’s 2026 Publisher Playbook shows Google Search referrals to its network fell 40.2% from July 2025 to July 2026. The year before, the drop was 21.9%.

Loyal visitors barely moved. Chartbeat defines a loyal visitor as someone who visits on at least 8 of 16 days. Loyal pageviews held at about 15 billion a month, up slightly from 2024. That’s roughly half of the network’s 31 billion monthly pageviews.

One caveat: Chartbeat’s network leans toward news publishers. But the direction matches what I hear from sports, lifestyle and enthusiast publishers too.

So the data suggests the traffic you're losing is mostly one-off visitors who clicked through from somewhere else. You still have a core audience that keeps coming back.

Chartbeat measures loyalty with its own identifiers, so a visitor who looks loyal there is not automatically recognizable in a bid request.

Here’s the uncomfortable part.

Coming back often doesn’t mean you know much about a visitor. Many publishers only truly know a user when they log in. In the publisher stacks I see, logged-in traffic is often only 2% to 5% of traffic.

That means someone can visit you every other day for a year and still look like a stranger. When that person’s impression goes to auction, the bid request lacks signal that could enrich the bid and earn you more.

That’s money left on the table. Today, many of your most loyal audience members' impressions sell at the same price as a first-time visitor from search.

A visitor who shows up 8 days out of 16 generates signal on every one of those visits. You don’t need a login to understand them. You need to capture that signal into a graph you own and send it into every bid request.

Signal Graph and Signal Enrich, part of Publisher Cloud, do this from one script. Signal Graph builds your graph nightly, with HEM enrichment included for U.S. traffic. Signal Enrich adds 20+ universal IDs to every bid request in real time. In our own measurement, one publisher network running a randomized holdout across more than 400 million enriched sessions saw 16% more Prebid revenue per session than its control group over thirteen months.

Further, EssentiallySports is a top-10 U.S. sports publisher by Comscore, with more than 1 million daily newsletter subscribers. After moving its first-party signal into the bidstream on GrowthCode infrastructure, it reports a 14% increase in monetization from email-driven sessions. It also reports a 10%+ revenue uplift in open RTB.

Because the graph is yours, it keeps improving with every impression. Your most frequent visitors are where it improves fastest.

Search traffic is falling, and you can’t plan on it coming back. If your loyal audience is still visiting your sites, their impressions should clear at what they're worth.

GrowthCode offers a 30-day POC. It’s one script, with no changes to your existing stack. You see the results on your own traffic before you commit to anything long-term. Request a demo today.

Trip Foster is Co-founder and CRO at GrowthCode. GrowthCode provides infrastructure to maximize signal for the digital advertising ecosystem.