Roger Lynch

We did this for a board meeting about six months ago.

Took a snapshot of search results from, I don't know, seven or eight years ago.

And what you saw were, you know, a few sponsored links and then the 10 blue, you know, the traditional search page.

Do the same search term today.

You get an AI overview.

Then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links.

It's been good for Google.

If you're a publisher, you've owned a second page.

So if you had a business that relied on that to arbitrage that traffic to sell whatever, that business got very, very difficult.

So, look, the changes in search traffic have certainly impacted our business, but not to the point that we haven't been able to grow our revenues and grow our profitability, but it's a headwind.

But last year, so each of the last three years,

We would do our budgets.

We'd put some forecasts in of search traffic declining.

Why?

Just because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes, and generally those algorithm changes were negative.

They had negative impacts.

So we're going to forecast it to be down, and then every year it was down more than we forecast.

So last year I told our teams, assume there's no search.

You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.

We don't expect it to be zero, but we expect it to be a single digit percentage of our traffic, very low.