The old SEO playbook is breaking. If your pipeline depends on Google sending you clicks, you’ve probably watched those clicks shrink over the last 18 months. We’ve seen it at SaaStr too, and I’ll share our numbers below.
In the same year, Shopify paid what’s reportedly the most money ever spent publicly on a domain name: around $100 million for Shop.com.
I think the second happened because of the first. And the lesson applies to B2B as much as to e-commerce.
The Deal
Market America announced on September 28 via PR Newswire that it had completed the sale of SHOP.COM to Shopify. Neither side disclosed a price. Domain broker Andrew Rosener then posted on X that Shopify paid $100 million. On Shopify’s Q3 earnings call, RBC’s Paul Treiber put the price at about $100 million, and management didn’t correct him.
What the word “shop” has cost over time:
- 2003: Shop.com sold for $3.5 million to Altura International.
- January 2025: Shopify bought Shop.ca and Shop.us for US$375,000.
- September 2026: Shop.com, for roughly $100 million.
If the $100 million holds, it’s the largest public domain sale on record, ahead of AI.com at $70 million.
On the call, Treiber also asked why Shopify did this now, with AI agents changing how people shop. Harley Finkelstein called the purchase “a declaration that we are ready for a more ambitious posture for Shop.” Shop had lived at shop.app and is moving to shop.com. Shop GMV more than doubled year-over-year in Q3.
So Shopify is putting $100M behind a consumer brand that’s doubling, in the same year that search is changing the most.
What’s Happening to Search Traffic
The numbers from the last year are pretty consistent:
- Pew Research found users clicked an organic result 8% of the time when an AI Overview appeared, versus 15% without one.
- Ahrefs found AI Overviews cut click-through rates on top-ranking organic results by 58%.
- Seer Interactive found organic CTR on informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61% since mid-2024, and paid CTR on those queries fell 68%.
- The zero-click rate went from 50% in 2019 to 64.82% in 2026, and reportedly reaches 93% in Google’s AI Mode.
There’s some counter-evidence. Seer’s latest data showed organic CTR on AI Overview queries rising from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026. The decline may be leveling off.
Even so, ranking #1 now often means your content gets summarized on Google’s page and the user never visits your site.
Reddit’s Q3 Call Shows What This Looks Like at Scale
If you want one company’s numbers on this, look at Reddit. For years, people typed “reddit” at the end of their Google searches to get real answers, and Google sent Reddit a huge amount of traffic.
On its October 29 Q3 call, Reddit told investors that traffic is going away.
- Search referral traffic declined meaningfully in Q3 and the decline accelerated into October, with referrals down more than 1 million per week on average.
- Steve Huffman told CNBC the drop came from Google’s shift to AI Mode and AI Overviews.
- U.S. daily active users fell from 53.2 million in Q2 to 50.7 million in Q3, down 2% year-over-year. The weakness was in logged-out U.S. users, down 4% year-over-year, while logged-in U.S. users grew 1%.
- If October’s trend continues, management said total daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage in Q4 from about 130 million.
- The stock fell 29.2% the next day.
Reddit’s response is the interesting part. It’s moving to a primarily logged-in experience, starting with tests in select markets outside the U.S. Logged-in and app users account for over 80% of monetization, and new user retention improved by over 50% year-over-year.
When an analyst asked whether Google traffic could come back, Huffman said he isn’t counting on it and is focused on making Reddit a direct, sticky destination.
And the business underneath is still growing fast. Revenue grew 53% year-over-year in Q3.
Reddit is losing traffic it never controlled and keeping the users who come to it directly. That’s the same bet Shopify made with Shop.com.
What We’re Seeing at SaaStr
We pulled our own GA4 data, comparing January 1 to November 2 this year against the same period in 2025.
- Total users are up about 45%. SaaStr isn’t shrinking.
- Organic search users are down about 5%. That’s a slow decline, not a collapse. But search went from about 35% of our users to about 23%.
- The search visitors we do get are worth less. Returning users who first came from search are down about 36%. Key events from organic search are down about 26%, and engaged sessions per search user are down about a third.
- Direct traffic roughly doubled and is now over 60% of our users, up from about 45%. Some of that is surely AI apps and other sources GA4 can’t attribute, so I wouldn’t read it all as people typing saastr.com. Either way, it’s traffic Google didn’t send us.
- Organic social is down about 45%. Search isn’t the only platform sending less traffic out.
- AI assistants now show up as their own channel. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and the rest send about 0.5% of our users, up from nothing measurable last year. That’s small. But those visitors convert to key events at about 1.5x the rate of visitors from organic search.
So for us, Google hasn’t stopped sending people. Its share of our audience fell by about a third in one year, and the people it sends come back less often and do less once they arrive. Our growth is coming from people who come to us directly, and a small but higher-intent slice is now arriving through AI assistants.
Branded Search Is Holding Up
The losses aren’t spread evenly. One 2026 analysis found branded queries lost only 3% of traffic, while B2B SaaS lost 34% of organic traffic year-over-year. The same research put branded position-1 CTR at 56.4%, versus 24.8% for non-branded.
When someone searches “best CRM for startups,” Google answers it on the results page. When someone searches your company’s name, they still come to your site.
So the traffic disappearing is generic, top-of-funnel, “how do I do X” traffic, which is exactly the content most B2B companies spent the last decade producing. Searches where the buyer already knows who they want are mostly intact. Reddit’s numbers line up with this, and so do ours: anonymous search visitors are worth less, and the people who already know you keep showing up.
Related: Seer found brands cited in AI Overviews get 35% higher organic click-through rates. The AI tends to cite brands that already have authority, so being well known also helps you get into the AI answer.
Why a Domain Is Worth More With AI Agents
When an agent sits between the buyer and the purchase, a few things get more valuable:
1. Direct visits. People who type your URL don’t depend on Google’s algorithm. If shop.com becomes a habit, Shopify keeps that traffic no matter what the results page looks like next year.
2. Your name in the prompt. “Find me running shoes on Shop.” The user still names a destination for the agent. A one-word name nobody can misspell matters more when people say it to ChatGPT than when it’s competing for a ranking.
3. How LLMs pick defaults. Models learn from what’s been written about a category. The stronger the link between a brand and a word, the more often the model suggests that brand. Owning the word “shop” itself is about as strong as that link gets.
Shopify bought the asset that gains value as clicks from search decline: being the default answer for a word.
They also did it in a rough quarter. Shopify stock fell 17% in morning trading today after GMV and subscription revenue missed estimates. A company doesn’t spend $100M on a name in a quarter like that unless it’s planning for the next decade.
What B2B Founders Should Do
You won’t spend $100M on a domain. The same logic still applies.
1. Plan for organic search to keep shrinking as a share of your traffic. Use that as your base case. Reddit, one of the biggest beneficiaries of Google search for a decade, is now guiding to a double-digit user decline in a single quarter. Even where raw search traffic only dips, as it has for us, the visitors are less valuable. If your 2027 pipeline model assumes search will do what it did in 2023, fix it now.
2. Look past the top-line search number. Our organic search users fell about 5%. Returning users and key events from search fell 25-35%. If you only watch sessions, you’ll miss most of the damage.
3. Stop writing generic explainer content. “What is X?” and “10 tips for Y” posts are what AI Overviews answer without sending a click. Write what only you can: your data, your customers’ results, your opinions.
4. Track four brand metrics every month:
- Direct traffic
- Branded search volume for your company and product names
- The AI Assistant channel in GA4, both visitor count and conversion rate
- Whether you show up when you ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for the top 3 vendors in your category
The last one is the new page one. If you’re not in the answer, you’re probably not on the shortlist.
5. Pick one or two words and own them. Most B2B companies describe themselves as something like “AI-powered revenue intelligence platform for modern GTM teams.” Buyers don’t say that, and neither will an agent. Choose the words buyers actually use and repeat them everywhere until they’re associated with you.
6. Turn anonymous visitors into known ones. Reddit is moving to logged-in because known users are where 80% of its money comes from. The B2B version is getting visitors onto your newsletter, into your product, into your community, or to your events, so you can reach them again without Google.
7. Invest more in channels you control. Events, communities, podcasts, newsletters, and a founder with a real following. Google algorithm updates don’t touch them, and they’re the signals that tell LLMs which brands matter in a category.
The Takeaway
Ten years ago, a $100M domain would have looked like vanity spending.
In 2026, Reddit is watching search traffic fall by more than a million referrals a week. At SaaStr, search went from more than a third of our audience to under a quarter in one year. And Shopify decided the name people type and say to their agents was worth a record price. All three point the same way: the companies that keep growing are the ones people come to directly. B2B founders should be asking which word they want buyers to say when they ask an agent for a vendor, and how many of their buyers they could reach tomorrow without Google.
