Crypto Media Traffic Collapse: De-Indexing, Zero-Click Compression, and Cyclicality
The crypto media industry has seen a significant decline in traffic over the past year, but the reasons behind this collapse are more complex than initially thought.
According to ICODA's two-year traffic analysis of 40 crypto news domains, the 'AI killed us' narrative is an oversimplification of the issue. Instead, there were three separate events that contributed to the decline in traffic: de-indexing, zero-click compression, and ordinary cyclicality.
Four domains - Cointelegraph, U.Today, DL News, and Unchained - accounted for 76.8% of the category's total organic traffic loss, with their traffic falling by a massive 99% or more. However, these domains were not affected by AI compression, but rather were removed from Google's index altogether.
The data also shows that the remaining 36 domains saw a relatively modest decline in traffic, losing around 12.2%. This suggests that the problem is not with AI adoption, but rather with how these sites are being presented to users.