Hi everyone, this is Neo.

Lately, a lot of owners and operators running overseas independent sites have been complaining to me: “Traffic is getting worse and worse — is SEO actually dying?”

And your instincts aren’t wrong. It’s not just a feeling — the data is cold and hard.

Just recently, Axios, a well-known US tech media outlet, exclusively published a data report by Chartbeat, a respected analytics firm. The report, covering thousands of websites globally, reveals a brutal truth: under the onslaught of AI search (like Google’s AI Overviews), small websites are going through an unprecedented “traffic massacre.”

Today, let’s dig into this report and figure out how small and mid-sized cross-border independent sites — B2B or B2C — can fight for survival in an era where AI dominates discovery.