Google Analytics 4 (GA4) became mandatory on July 1, 2023, when standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new data. Less than a year later, on May 14, 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews to U.S. users.
The timing matters: The industry lost a clean, comparable measurement baseline just as search traffic patterns started to shift. So, over the past 12 months, who gained website traffic in the U.S., and who lost it?
The Semrush Traffic Analytics tool tracks the most visited websites in the U.S. and updates the list monthly, making it one of the few sources that can answer that question with real numbers rather than vibes.
I pulled the data as of July 2026 and compared it against the same period a year earlier. What I found confirms some of what you’d expect and contradicts the rest.
The giants didn’t move. Their traffic did.
The top of the list looks almost identical to how it looked a year ago.
- Google still ranks first in the U.S., with 25.3 billion monthly visits.
- YouTube is still second, at 10.3 billion.
- Reddit is still third, at 2.61 billion.
If you only glanced at these rankings, you’d conclude that nothing had changed. You’d be wrong. Google’s traffic is up 10.72% year over year. YouTube is up a startling 36.6% compared to a year ago.
Between them, Google and YouTube now account for a huge share of all attention at the top of the web, and the top three sites alone generate 54.3% of the top 10’s traffic. Concentration at the very top hasn’t loosened. If anything, it’s tightened.
That stability is itself the headline. Total visits across the top 150 U.S. sites only rose 6.1% year over year, and the top 10 still account for 68.6% of all of it, almost unchanged from 68.8% a year ago.
The web isn’t getting less concentrated as AI changes search. It’s getting more so, just with a couple of new names inside the circle.
See where your brand appears in AI search, where competitors are winning, and what it takes to become the answer AI recommends.
The clearest winner: ChatGPT
If you want one number that captures how much the search landscape has shifted, it’s this one: ChatGPT.com is up 48.38% year over year, now ranking ninth among all U.S. websites with 1.09 billion monthly visits, ahead of DuckDuckGo and Bing.
A year ago, that sentence would’ve read differently. Today, an AI chatbot outranks a couple of search engines that have been around since 2008 and 2009.
TikTok, by comparison, ranks 14th with 573.6 million visits and a much more modest 1.63% year-over-year gain. So, it’s not that “new platforms” are winning across the board — it’s specifically that generative AI usage has moved from novelty to habit fast enough to show up as one of the single-biggest traffic gains anywhere in the top 20.
A few other winners are worth flagging because they aren’t AI chatbots:
- LinkedIn climbed from 21st to 19th place, with visits up 15.48% year over year to 473.7 million — enough to push it into the top 20 for the first time in this data set.
- USPS.com is up 12.04% year over year, a reminder that utility and habit still drive traffic even in an AI-saturated news cycle.
- Twitch climbed five spots to 25th after a 25.6% jump in visits.
- Comix.to, further down the list, posted the single-largest percentage gain of any site I looked at, jumping 14 places (70th to 56th) on a 37.3% increase in visits.
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The losers are more interesting than the winners
Here’s what surprised me: The steepest year-over-year decline in the entire top 20 doesn’t belong to a struggling news site or a fading social network. It belongs to Bing, which is down 50.43% year over year.
Microsoft has spent three years and enormous sums bolting Copilot onto Bing to convert AI hype into search share, and the traffic data suggests that bet still hasn’t paid off the way Redmond hoped.
Bing’s standalone search share has been essentially flat against Google for years, and this year’s numbers look like a continuation of that pattern rather than a break from it.
Temu is the other big decliner, down 28.55% year over year. That one has a clear, well-documented cause.
The closure of the “de minimis” tariff exemption on low-value Chinese imports in mid-2025 gutted the pricing advantage that built Temu’s U.S. business in the first place, and reporting at the time showed Temu’s U.S. ad spend and app rankings collapsing in tandem with the policy change.
This wasn’t an SEO story or an AI story. It was a trade policy story that happened to show up in traffic data.
The rest of the losers list is a mix of the predictable and the genuinely surprising:
- Amazon, down 15.31% year over year — a notable decline for a site whose traffic is usually treated as a bellwether for ecommerce health.
- Yahoo, down 13.82%.
- DuckDuckGo, down 15.83%, which is worth sitting with given that it’s a search engine, not a social network or a retailer.
- ESPN fell from 19th to 24th (visits down 16.0% to 366.0 million).
- NBCNews.com dropped 35 spots to 145th, with visits down 20.2%.
None of these losses are identical in cause. But taken together, they say something the top-line “Google and YouTube are still winning” narrative doesn’t: Traffic is being redistributed, unevenly and for different reasons, well below the top three positions everyone already watches.
Here’s the part that should worry SEOs
Jes Scholz wrote a piece back in February called “Why GA4 alone can’t measure the real impact of AI SEO,” arguing that relying on GA4 by itself leaves AI SEO measurement lost in what she called the Bermuda Triangle of analytics.
I didn’t fully appreciate how right she was until I looked at a GA4 account that I hadn’t checked out in a year.
For context, I provide pro bono consulting to a niche publishing website. I recently pulled their GA4 traffic acquisition report for Jan. 1 through Aug. 26, 2026, and compared it to the same period in 2025.
On the surface, it looks like great news: sessions up over 105%, engaged sessions up almost 111%, key events up about 80.5%. If you stopped there, you’d tell this publisher they’re winning.
Keep reading the same report, though, and direct traffic is up more than 157% and now accounts for over 78% of their total traffic, up from about 62.5% a year earlier. That means GA4 can’t identify where almost four out of every five visitors came from — and that share is growing every month.
“Direct” isn’t a traffic source. It’s the label GA4 slaps on everything it can’t attribute, and an increasing amount of that unattributed traffic is almost certainly arriving via links generated inside AI chat interfaces, which routinely get stripped of the referrer data that GA4 depends on.
So, is this niche publisher winning? It depends on whether you’re looking backward or forward.
The historical metrics look fantastic. However, the attribution underneath them is getting worse every month, which means the next set of decisions this publisher makes about content and channel investment will be based on data that’s actively losing its ability to explain itself.
Two rules of Italian driving
There’s a scene in the 1976 movie “The Gumball Rally” where the Italian racer Franco, played by Raul Julia, climbs into his Ferrari Daytona Spyder before a cross-country race, rips the rearview mirror clean off the windshield, and tosses it over his shoulder.
“And now, my friend, the primo rule of Italian driving,” he says. “What’s-a behind me is not important.”
That’s what I’d recommend doing with most of GA4’s 19 default channels at this point — including the AI Assistant channel, which tracks visits arriving from ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot, or Grok. (It excludes Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode entirely.)
It’s not a huge loss. According to GA4, only 0.47% of traffic to this same niche publisher’s site has come through the native AI Assistant channel since GA4 added it on May 13, 2026. Whatever AI-driven traffic they’re getting isn’t showing up where it’s supposed to.
This prompted me to create the second rule of Italian driving: Pay more attention to the audience intelligence and market research tools that can see the treacherous road ahead instead of the one behind you.
That list, for SEOs trying to navigate this difficult challenge, includes:
- Semrush’s website traffic tracker, which estimates monthly traffic for any domain or URL and shows where competitor traffic originates, which pages capture it, and which keywords and channels drive growth.
- SparkToro’s audience research software, which surfaces what a target audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows — particularly useful for mapping channel affinities, subreddits, and podcasts that GA4 will never show you.
- GWI (Global Web Index), which runs pre-profiled consumer panels across more than 50 markets and excels at granular psychographic and behavioral segmentation.
- YouGov Profiles, for continuous survey data on brand perception, shopping habits, and demographics.
SEOs should also just start surveying their own customers directly — combining traditional survey tools that capture direct feedback with analytics tools that decode implicit intent gives you both the exact phrases customers use and the content gaps they reveal.
On the survey side, they should consider using:
- SurveyMonkey for deep segment research, with AI-driven synthesis that groups open-ended responses into themes you can turn directly into content categories.
- Typeform for response rates, thanks to a conversational interface that works well embedded in high-traffic landing pages or posts.
- Google Forms for quick, zero-budget pulse checks that flow straight into a spreadsheet.
- Qualtrics for enterprise-grade logic flows and demographic segmentation.
Track your visibility across AI search, uncover missed opportunities, and grow your presence where customers are asking questions.
Measure what GA4 can’t see
It might seem strange to end an article about website traffic winners and losers with a list of survey tools. But that’s the point.
Google and YouTube are still winning, ChatGPT is gaining ground, Bing and DuckDuckGo are losing for different reasons, and underneath all of it, the tool most SEOs still lean on hardest — GA4 — is becoming less able to tell you which channel any individual visitor belongs to.
So, to be one of next year’s winners instead of next year’s cautionary tale, adopt both rules of Italian driving: Pay less attention to what GA4’s default channels tell you about where your traffic came from, and pay a lot more attention to the audience intelligence and market research tools built to see what GA4 can’t.
