Ziff Davis says organic Google referrals to its properties fell about 37% year over year in the third quarter. CEO Vivek Shah told analysts on the company’s Nov. 6 earnings call that referrals fell about 23% in the same quarter last year, putting the two-year decline at more than 50%.
Shah referenced an impressions figure from Google Search Console as well. Ziff Davis’ digital media sites generated about 2.7 billion impressions for both AI Overviews and AI Mode during the quarter, which was nearly 10 times “the clicks those same sites received from Google Search” based on his estimates. Other sites that have Search Console’s generative AI report are able to generate the same comparison. Google’s definitions show this compares impression counts inside their AI feature reporting vs. all click throughs from Search.
Shah said Ziff Davis is “not planning on a search recovery” and expects referrals to keep falling. Third-quarter revenue fell 5.6% to $289.3 million, a smaller drop he attributed to businesses that don’t rely on Google traffic, such as subscriptions and apps.
What The 2.7 Billion Figure Counts
Shah said an impression is a count of “how many times a link to a page was shown inside generative AI features” and that this figure is coming from Search Console. Google has a help page to explain what the generative AI performance report does and it says the report counts the number of times links to a site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Since the report draws these two features from the Web search data within the main Performance report, AI impressions are a subset of a website’s total Search impression figures.
Google’s help page on how clicks are counted says a click on a link to another website within an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts towards a site’s total click count. None of the Search appearance types listed by Google for the Performance report includes either feature.
Shah did not say during the call where he got his click total from. If Shah used Search Console to get his total clicks from Google Search, then those clicks would include AI Overview clicks, AI Mode clicks and every other possible type of result in Search. This means that Shah’s ratio is comparing AI feature impressions to all clicks from Search. As of Nov. 8, Google documents no separate AI click count.
I covered how Search Console counts AI clicks last week, after Google’s Gary Illyes said the company had nothing to announce yet on adding more data.
Where Referrals Fell And What Held Up
Shah referred to “the disruption of search traffic by Google and LLMs” as a clear business headwind. He said that Ziff Davis’ tech and shopping brands “continue to face the strongest search traffic headwinds in our portfolio”; however, he also highlighted offset areas, such as social commerce and the relaunched RetailMeNot app.
Ziff Davis’ tech and shopping revenue declined 3.8% year over year during the quarter to $82 million (as reported in its earnings presentation). The decline has narrowed for three consecutive quarters per Shah’s account.
Shah said Ziff Davis’ largest property based on search referrals, IGN, has continued to hold up relatively well. He explained that “a lot of its search referral is around game help, which is very maps heavy” and that it is difficult to duplicate game maps. IGN also receives a significant amount of direct traffic.
Despite that, gaming and entertainment revenue declined 2.1%, and Shah attributed the decline to the poor gaming advertising environment leading up to the release of Grand Theft Auto VI later this month. He added that IGN’s business is significantly driven by video, including vertical and social video, versus web traffic.
What Shah Said On Earlier Calls
In his comments to investors during the Ziff Davis earnings call in November 2025, Shah said AI Overviews were present in 29% of search queries that generate the majority of Ziff Davis’ traffic. While there had been a slight decrease in the percentage of searches containing AI Overviews, he was more concerned with overall Google search volatility than with AI Overviews themselves. His current figure for that quarter’s referral decline is about 23%.
In August, he said AI Overviews appeared on about 50% of the queries relevant to Ziff Davis’ properties, up from about 36% when he last gave the figure. He didn’t give an AI Overview share on the Nov. 6 call.
Licensing And The OpenAI Case
Shah said making money from Ziff Davis’ content in AI answers was “the priority”, and that they are open to licensing agreements. Additionally, he expects the pending litigation by Ziff Davis against OpenAI will help clarify this space. In his words, “there is a gap between usage and monetization” even as marketers give more weight to AI visibility when choosing media partners.
Why This Matters
Ziff Davis plans for referrals to continue declining; Shah’s method will provide each of these sites that have the generative AI report with a large publisher’s number to place next to its own. Those sites can recreate the ratio by comparing their AI impression data to their web search click data for the same time period. Since clicks on AI link results are included with all other Search clicks, the result cannot be used as an AI click-through rate.
Looking Ahead
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has set a Dec. 3 deadline for Google to give publishers impressions, clicks and click-through rate for AI search features in the UK, aggregated across features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, according to the regulator’s summary. As I reported last week, the CMA’s interpretive notes name Search Console as one example of where that data could appear.
Watch how Google provides those metrics around Dec. 3. If it reports AI clicks apart from other Search clicks, publishers could line them up with their AI impressions.
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