Hi everyone, this is Neo.

Lately I’ve been chatting with a lot of founders and operators running overseas independent sites, and there’s one worry everyone keeps circling: Google organic traffic is dropping way too hard. For many, a once-stable traffic pool suddenly feels like someone yanked the fuel out from under it.

And it’s not just your imagination — the entire overseas search ecosystem is going through an “earthquake.”

Recently, an article by a well-known overseas marketing publication — “Your Traffic Just Got Halved, and All the SEO Industry Sent You Is Thoughts and Frameworks” — has been blowing up in the industry. It exposes a brutal truth: ever since Google fully rolled out AI Overviews (AIO), the old rules of the SEO game have been shattered. Organic traffic across a massive number of content sites plunged 42% — and never bounced back.

Today, let’s dig into the underlying logic behind this traffic earthquake, and how we — as operators of B2B and B2C independent sites — should respond.