Search referral traffic to small publishers has dropped 60% over two years, according to Chartbeat data exclusively published by Axios. This is nearly three times the decline at large publishers. The analytics firm, which tracks traffic across thousands of client websites globally, segmented its network by size. Mid-sized publishers (10,000 to 100,000 daily page views) lost 47%, and large publishers (100,000 or more daily page view) lost 22%. The decline in search traffic was also revealed, with Google Search seeing a 34% drop in page views between December 2024 and December 2025. Meanwhile, ChatGPT referrals grew more than 200% during this period, but still accounted for less than 1% of all publisher page view referrals. Larger publishers are finding alternative traffic sources to offset search losses.