For 21 years, a single volunteer-run website held its ground at the top of Google search results for some of the most important environmental queries on the internet. Then, sometime in the fourth quarter of 2023, the traffic started disappearing - not all at once, but in a pattern so precise it pointed to one cause. Today, overfishing.org is gone.

A website that outlasted its search engine

Pepijn, the Dutch operator of overfishing.org, announced on February 25, 2024, that the site was shutting down after more than two decades of continuous operation. According to a post published that day on Mastodon, the site had served as an independent reference used by politicians, students, documentary filmmakers, and researchers. It had no advertising. It carried no external social tracking integrations. Every claim was properly referenced.

At its height, the site attracted more than 5,000 unique visitors on a single day and generated a constant stream of email inquiries from students, educators, and journalists. It was cited in textbooks, reports, and presentations. According to Pepijn, it was also used to shape national and international political statements on fisheries policy. For certain keyword searches, overfishing.org ranked above Wikipedia - a feat that took years of careful content stewardship to achieve and maintain.

None of that was enough.

The traffic collapse, documented in real time

According to posts published on Mastodon in May 2026, in which Pepijn provided detailed context to a thread that had resurfaced the February 2024 announcement, the traffic loss followed a distinctive pattern. In the period Pepijn estimates as Q4 2023, organic visitor numbers from the United States began fluctuating in ways that had no obvious explanation. On Monday and Tuesday, the site might see approximately 750 unique IP addresses - defined as visitors accessing two or more pages. Then, for two days, the figure would drop to roughly 50. On Friday, it would recover to around 750 again.

That oscillation was not random noise. It corresponded, according to Pepijn's account, to Google testing its AI Overviews feature by region and by time period. Whenever Google activated the feature in a particular region, traffic to overfishing.org from that region effectively disappeared. When the feature was turned off or not yet active, normal visitor numbers returned. Eventually, the low number became permanent.

"Whenever Google enabled this in a region the traffic to overfishing.org just disappeared," Pepijn wrote in a May 22, 2026 post.

The contrast with the previous generation of Google features was explicit. Google's earlier "Quick answers" snippets, active since the 2010s, did not produce the same effect. Those snippets used excerpts and linked back to the original source. The AI Overviews system operates differently: it rewrites and synthesizes content from multiple sources, and the links it includes are, according to Pepijn, practically invisible to users. "The 'AI summaries' links are useless as nothing is ever properly quoted by this re-writing-machine," the post states.

What the site was - and what replaced it

The scope of what overfishing.org covered helps explain why the traffic loss mattered beyond a single operator's frustration. According to Pepijn, the site contained approximately 300 individual pages, some attracting 300 visitors per day, others as few as 50 per year. Content included an introduction to overfishing as a concept, teaching materials, infographics, satellite imagery of bottom trawling in the Dutch Waddensea, and fish guides that users consulted before purchasing seafood. The site was explicitly designed to reach the general public - people who heard a term on television and opened a search engine to learn more.

What AI Overviews serves in response to those same queries is, according to Pepijn, something qualitatively different. "The AI summaries on this topic do the opposite: they give a false sense of quality and are not actionable." The concern is not simply that less traffic arrives at the original site. It is that the replacement content - synthesized from multiple sources, rewritten by a machine, and presented without the curation and citation discipline that distinguished overfishing.org - may actively mislead users who believe they are receiving authoritative information.

This is a structural problem that extends well beyond one site. Small publishers lost 60% of search traffic over two years, according to Chartbeat data analyzed in a March 2026 report. The inflection point in that dataset arrived in late October 2024, when Google expanded AI Overviews to more than 100 countries - but the pattern Pepijn describes on overfishing.org began earlier, consistent with regional testing that preceded the global rollout.

The numbers behind the pattern

The data supporting Pepijn's account has accumulated from multiple independent sources. Ahrefs research comparing 300,000 searches from March 2024 with March 2025 found that when AI Overviews appear in search results, the first organic result loses an average of 34.5% of its clicks. For informational keywords - precisely the category that dominated overfishing.org's traffic - the position-one click-through rate fell from 0.073 in March 2024 to 0.026 in March 2025, according to the Ahrefs methodology.

A Pew Research Center study published in July 2025 found that website link clicks fell by half when AI summaries appeared. Users also ended their browsing sessions entirely at a higher rate after encountering AI summaries - 26% of the time, compared to 16% with traditional search results. And of those users who did see source citations within AI Overviews, only 1% clicked through to the underlying websites.

The trajectory for total web traffic is consistent. Open web traffic has declined 46% over three years, according to data cited by Rand Fishkin of SparkToro. For every 1,000 Google searches in the United States, only 360 clicks go to external websites, according to analysis tracked by PPC Land. Nearly 60% of Google searches now end without any click to any external site at all.

UK research published in November 2025 provided sector-level detail. A study by agency Tank analyzing 800 companies across 16 industries found that average monthly organic traffic growth fell from 26.3% before the AI search rollout to 3.7% after it - a decline of 22.6 percentage points. Hospitality was the hardest-hit sector, recording negative growth of 6.7%. The research covered the period from August 2022 through August 2025, providing three years of comparable data.

Google Search traffic to news publishers fell from 51% of referrals in 2023 to 27% by the fourth quarter of 2025, according to data from NewzDash. Traditional Google Search traffic dropped from approximately 16% to 10% of total referrals across all publisher types during the period when AI Overviews expanded globally, according to Chartbeat figures analyzed by Press Gazette.

The structural argument

Pepijn's account is notable not just for its specificity but for the argument it makes about what kind of web content can survive the current environment - and what cannot.

Commercial sites selling products have a transaction at the end of the funnel that does not depend entirely on search traffic. Large media organizations have brand recognition, newsletter subscribers, and app users who arrive without using a search engine. But a site like overfishing.org depended entirely on search as its distribution mechanism, and on the general public's curiosity as its audience. There was no product to sell. There was no subscriber list to fall back on. There was only the moment when someone typed a question into a search box and needed a reliable answer.

That specific use case - verified, curated, non-commercial information delivered to curious people through organic search - appears to be among the most severely affected by the shift to AI-generated summaries. The overfishing case is unusual only in that its operator documented the collapse in real time and in public, providing a level of granularity that corporate publishers rarely match.

The point was not lost on others. In the Mastodon thread sparked by the original February 2024 announcement and the follow-up posts in May 2026, Mastodon user Jim Winstead observed that "Google's use of it killing a site about overfishing is just a little too on the nose."

Wikipedia editor and contributor Amir Aharoni noted that Wikipedia itself depends on specialized reference sites like overfishing.org for sourcing. Without those sites providing carefully vetted information, Wikipedia's own reliability is indirectly weakened.

The misinformation dimension

There is a secondary concern in Pepijn's account that goes beyond traffic economics. A site like overfishing.org was designed to fight misinformation about fish stock depletion - a topic where commercial interests, national fishing policies, and public understanding routinely diverge. The site's information was carefully referenced, regularly updated, and deliberately non-commercial.

AI summaries on the same topic, according to Pepijn's assessment, provide a "false sense of quality." The problem is specific: synthesized outputs can sound authoritative while drawing on a wide pool of sources of varying reliability, without the editorial judgment that a domain-expert curator applies. A general-purpose language model has no particular competence in distinguishing a fishing industry lobby's estimate of sustainable catch from a peer-reviewed fisheries science paper. A specialist editor does.

Pepijn also noted that maintaining accuracy required constant upkeep. The site's approximately 300 pages contained information that changes - fish stock assessments, regulatory changes, quota decisions. "Without stewardship a site like this can itself become the source of misinformation it aims to fight," a May 25, 2026 post noted. That recognition of editorial responsibility is not something an AI summary inherits when it absorbs and retransmits the content.

Industry context: the wider shutdown pattern

Overfishing.org is not an isolated case. A Bloomberg investigation published in April 2025 documented 25 publishers experiencing traffic losses of 70% to 90%, with at least three websites whose operators had attended a Google summit in October 2024 subsequently shutting down entirely. One DIY home improvement site saw display advertising revenue fall 65% in the year following its traffic collapse, representing tens of thousands of dollars in lost income.

The pattern affects different content categories differently. Travel bloggers Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil experienced a 90% traffic reduction after AI Overviews began reproducing their specialized content about Canadian slang. ClickUp's blog fell from 1.19 million monthly organic visitors in January 2025 to fewer than 29,000 by April 2026 - a 97.6% decline across 15 months. These are businesses with substantial resources. Independent, volunteer-run reference sites have no equivalent capacity to absorb or respond to such losses.

The alternative search engines that some users have proposed as substitutes offer limited relief. As users in the same Mastodon thread noted, DuckDuckGo draws its results from Microsoft Bing. Nearly all alternative search engines depend on either Google's or Bing's underlying index. The structural dependence means that no change in the search engine a user chooses necessarily changes the incentive structure that produced the original problem.

What remains

Pepijn updated the overfishing.org domain redirect in May 2026 at the request of people following the thread. A May 25, 2026 post noted that a "very basic version" might eventually be put back online, but "more as a reminisce than a real resource." The 300-page resource, with its satellite imagery, infographics, fish guides, and teaching materials, is not coming back in its original form.

The domain is still registered. The content, according to Pepijn, still exists. But without the traffic that made the effort meaningful - without the students who emailed their questions, the educators who built presentations around it, the politicians who cited it in committee hearings - maintaining it would mean feeding information into a system that no longer reliably delivers it to the people who need it.

"With that gone I don't just want to feed misinformation machine," Pepijn wrote on May 22, 2026.

That sentence describes something precise: a rational calculation made by someone who had spent two decades building something genuinely useful, watched an algorithmic change make it effectively invisible, and concluded that the effort was no longer justified by the outcome. It is a calculation that is being made, in different forms, by operators of specialized reference sites across many topics - sites that served as the source layer for Wikipedia, for student research, for documentary filmmakers, and for the curious members of the public who once could type a question into a search engine and receive an answer from a human who actually knew.

Timeline

  • 2003: Pepijn launches overfishing.org as an independent, non-commercial reference site on fisheries depletion
  • 2010s: Google introduces "Quick answers" snippets, which excerpt and link back to source websites without significant traffic impact on overfishing.org
  • Q4 2023: Pepijn begins noticing traffic anomalies, with US visitor counts oscillating between approximately 750 on some days and 50 on others - later attributed to regional Google AI Overviews testing
  • October 2024: Google expands AI Overviews to more than 100 countries, coinciding with a sharp inflection in publisher traffic data documented by Chartbeat
  • February 25, 2024: Pepijn announces the closure of overfishing.org on Mastodon, citing the collapse of search traffic in a siloed internet
  • April 7, 2025: A Bloomberg investigation documents traffic losses of 70% to 90% across 25 independent publishers, with at least three sites from a Google summit shutting down
  • April 17, 2025: Ahrefs publishes research across 300,000 keywords finding AI Overviews reduce the first organic result's clicks by an average of 34.5%
  • July 22, 2025: Pew Research Center publishes a study finding website link clicks fall by half when AI summaries appear, with only 1% of AI Overview interactions resulting in source link clicks
  • October 30, 2025: Tank research finds UK organic traffic growth collapsed 86% following Google's AI search rollout across 800 companies in 16 sectors
  • March 17, 2026: Chartbeat data shows small publishers lost 60% of search traffic over two years, with AI chatbots providing under 1% of replacement traffic
  • April 18, 2026: ClickUp's blog documented at 97.6% traffic collapse from 1.19 million to fewer than 29,000 monthly visitors in 15 months
  • May 14, 2026: SparkToro data cited in pre-orders for Zero Click Marketing shows open web traffic has fallen 46% in three years
  • May 22, 2026: Pepijn publishes a detailed thread on Mastodon explaining the mechanics of the traffic collapse at overfishing.org, linking it explicitly to regional AI Overviews testing beginning in Q4 2023
  • May 23, 2026: Pepijn restores the overfishing.org domain redirect following requests from the Mastodon thread
  • May 25, 2026: Pepijn addresses questions about restoring the site, noting that a basic version may return as an archive but that the 300-page resource cannot be maintained without meaningful readership

Summary

Who: Pepijn, a Dutch operator who ran overfishing.org for 21 years as a volunteer-maintained, non-commercial reference site used by politicians, students, educators, documentary filmmakers, and researchers.

What: The site shut down on February 25, 2024, following a sustained collapse in organic search traffic that Pepijn links to Google's regional testing and subsequent global rollout of AI Overviews. The feature synthesizes and rewrites content from source websites, providing answers directly within search results and reducing the incentive for users to visit original sources. Traffic from the United States dropped from approximately 750 unique visitors per day to around 50 on days when the feature was active, eventually becoming permanent.

When: Traffic anomalies began in Q4 2023. The site officially closed on February 25, 2024. Pepijn provided detailed public context about the closure's causes in a Mastodon thread beginning May 22, 2026.

Where: overfishing.org was accessible globally. Its primary audience was the general public using Google and other major search engines. The Mastodon discussion took place on mastodon.online, a server operated by Mastodon GmbH.

Why: The case matters because it illustrates a structural shift in how search engines handle informational queries. Non-commercial reference sites that depended on search as their sole distribution mechanism - sites with no advertising, no subscriber base, and no product to sell - appear particularly vulnerable to AI Overviews. The pattern is consistent with data from Ahrefs, Chartbeat, Pew Research, and SparkToro showing systematic declines in clicks to external websites across all categories of organic search. The closure of overfishing.org removes a resource that supported Wikipedia sourcing, educational curricula, and public awareness of fisheries depletion, replacing human-curated expert content with AI-synthesized summaries whose accuracy and actionability the original site operator describes as inferior.