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Is the “Direct” the new SEO?
Posted by on May 21, 2026 at 1:17 pmI'm of the opinion that "free traffic" is shifting from Google referrals to "Direct" referrals, as it is defined in GA4. For most of my sites, which includes those that I own, and those that I've built for clients, I've lost a lot of traffic from Google over the past few years, but I am gaining most of it back, if not more, in the "Direct" category.
Historically, "Direct" was mostly people visiting you from bookmarks, typing in your URL, or browser autocomplete. But then it included mobile app referrals like Facebook, SMS apps, privacy-focused browsers. Now, it includes referrals from AI chat apps (as opposed to AI websites) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc, and people talking through a voice assistant.
My "Direct" traffic is now equal to, or double that, of Google, depending on which site's GA4 i am looking at.
I know "Direct" can also include bots. But overall, I think as our Internet usage is fanning out more heavily into apps, and voice assist, our referrals are increasingly getting lumped into "Direct".
In some of my sites, my traffic has recovered from Google's slow killing of SEO. "Direct" is the new SEO.
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1 Reply
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[removed]
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I don’t have much to add other than to say I’m also seeing our direct traffic start to tick up while our organic drops monthly
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My theory is that people are doing the “research” phase through AI and then when ready they’ll type your website directly.
Also doesn’t AI traffic fall under referral not direct?
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At least for 2 of my clients (one SaaS and one in finance) this was happening during the “decoupling.”
They followed similar trend until Direct started to increase as organic dropped. I’m in agreement people are researching the brand and then going DIRECTLY to the site.
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I don’t have this pattern on my end. Search keeps dominating and direct traffic just won’t take off. Worth noting this is on the French market.
Same thing on another site, no clear trend emerging.
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I think also anytime a link has the attribute rel=”noreferrer” it counts as direct (since browsers treat it that way for privacy reasons). Not sure if that is impacting the counts in your case, but just food for thought.
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FWIW I use foglift.io and it shows me which LLMs + search my referrals came from. I’ve stopped using search console exclusively and now used their combined traffic view.
It of course doesn’t identify direct traffic but it provides a much more detailed view.
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I’ll take another metric for the narrative, thanks
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I feel like I’m going crazy trying to explain that our direct traffic isn’t up 80% YoY because people are more loyal to our brand, but I don’t have the proof.
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Direct has always been a bit of a catchall bucket for ‘anything that doesn’t fit neatly into other categories’, but I’ve definitely seen a similar trend on some sites as SEO traffic has typically stayed steady.
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