AI search overtook Google in my traffic last month. I think the content that wins is changing, not just the channel.

Quick heads-up from my own analytics, in case it's not just me.

Last month, ChatGPT + Perplexity + Claude combined passed Google organic as my top traffic source for the first time. Same month, Google organic roughly halved.

So it's two trends at once: AI referrers climbing while Google falls out from under me.

Here's the part I didn't expect.

The pages the AI engines pull aren't my best-ranked ones. They're the pages with a clean, specific number or a table near the top. A quotable fact.

The long keyword-optimized posts that used to rank? Mostly ignored by the AI answers. They want something they can lift in one sentence and attribute, not 2,000 words they'd have to summarize.

If that holds, the old SEO instinct (write long, target the keyword, rank) is optimizing for a channel that's shrinking. Meanwhile the thing that earns AI citations is almost the opposite: short, sourced, factual, easy to quote.

I'm small and early, so take the absolute claim with salt. But the direction was sharp enough that I've stopped writing for the ranking and started writing for the citation.

For those of you with more traffic than me: is Google organic dropping on your end too, and are you seeing AI referrers show up in analytics yet?

Trying to figure out if this is a niche thing or a real shift.