Organic search traffic is falling: what happens to Sunweb happens to you

What is happening at Sunweb

Sunweb sells holidays. Big company, its own marketing team, years of solid visibility in Google. Even so, its organic search traffic is falling by twenty percent a year, Emerce reports.

They did not get worse at their job. Searching itself changed. Someone looking for a sunny week in September used to get a list of links. Now they get an answer. They read it, they are satisfied, and they click nothing.

That changes the maths under every website. Your page can still rank fine. It simply gets opened less often.

Why you notice it later than they do

Sunweb has people staring at dashboards every day. A twenty percent drop shows up straight away, and there is a team ready to act on it.

You have a site that quietly does its job and that you check once a quarter. Fewer visitors from Google disappears into the noise. A slow month. Holiday season. A stretch with few enquiries. You can explain it away for two years while the floor slowly gives out underneath.

The cause usually is not something you did wrong. A layer has appeared between you and your customer, and that layer answers the question on your behalf.

Being findable in AI is not the same as ranking in Google

Google handed over ten links and let the visitor choose. An AI assistant does not. It tells one story about your field. Sometimes it names a company, sometimes it does not.

That is where it pinches. When I ask business owners what ChatGPT says about their company, almost nobody knows. You are already being discussed, in conversations you never see, and you have no idea whether it is accurate.

This does not mean SEO is dead. Your pages are exactly where an assistant gets its information. The goal has shifted. You used to write to win a click. Now you also write to be quoted correctly by something that reads your site and summarises it.

What you can do with this tomorrow

I would start by looking rather than building. One hour, no more.

• Go and ask. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Ask the five questions your customers ask. Write down whether you get named and whether the facts hold up.
• Fix what is wrong. Old opening hours, a former address, services you dropped: that nearly always comes from pages you control. Correct it on your site, in your Google profile and in your listings.
• Write answers, not keyword pages. One page per real customer question, with the price range, the lead time and the service area written out in plain words. A person reads that comfortably and an assistant can pass it on.
• Build your own channels alongside. Being found without Google means, in practice, a customer list, a newsletter and word of mouth you actually keep track of.

And keep it calm. You do not need to rip up your marketing because a travel company had a dip. You want to know what is being said about you instead of leaving it to chance. If you get stuck, email me at info@mia-automation.com and we will look at what your numbers really say.