Google is sending less organic traffic compared to last year

Reports indicate that organic search traffic from Google is down compared to last year, while organic traffic from DuckDuckGo is up significantly. Merkle's Q2 2019 digital marketing report shows that organic Google search visits decreased by 8% compared to the same period in 2018.

Natural and organic traffic from Bing and Yahoo also declined, down 26% and 11%, respectively. DuckDuckGo is the only major search engine to grow in organic search traffic in the last quarter, with 49% growth in visits overall. When looking at mobile traffic specifically, DuckDuckGo is up 64% year over year.

DuckDuckGo's growth in mobile search was very strong with the share of organic search on mobile doubling from 0.3% to 0.6%. Driving organic traffic from search engines generated 23% of all website traffic in Q2 2019.

Total traffic generated by organic search declined 6% year-over-year in Q2 2019, much larger than the 2% decline in Q1 2019. Organic search traffic declined across all devices but especially on mobile, where traffic growth declined from 13% in Q1 2019 to 5% in Q2 2019. Data suggests that paid search traffic on mobile is already negatively impacting organic traffic, especially in search results that include ads.

Phones and tablets generated 59% of organic search traffic in Q2 2019 compared to 65% of paid search traffic. These results do not mean, of course, that your site visits will decline or that you will notice it.