copper vision · field audit VOL.01 / 2026.04
╴ a reverification

The web-traffic study
everyone still quotes
is seven years old.

GrowthBadger analyzed 3.25B visits in 2019. I audited every comparable claim against 2025/26 data. What survived, what broke, what flipped.

✦✦
01The four numbers that tell the story
Facebook's share of social referrals
65% 77%
Dominance intensified. The 2019 study understated it.
X / Twitter as a traffic source
10.0% 1.8%
Platform decisions gutted the referral flow.
WebMD search visibility since peak
~300 ~170
Health vertical crushed by HCU and AI Overviews.
Zero-click Google searches
56% 69%
AI Overviews made this structural, not cyclical.
✦✦
02How social media referrals actually moved

Share of social-media referral traffic by platform. Copper is 2019. Clove green is 2025.

Facebook
2019 · 65.4
2025 · 77.0
↑ 11.6
X / Twitter
2019 · 10.0
2025 · 1.8
↓ 8.2
Reddit
2019 · 9.0
2025 · 1.4
↓ 7.6
LinkedIn
2019 · 3.2
2025 · 3.0
↓ 0.2
YouTube
2019 · 2.7
2025 · 1.9
↓ 0.8
Pinterest
2019 · 2.2
2025 · 2.6
↑ 0.4
Instagram
2019 · 0.5
2025 · 6.7
↑ 6.2
TikTok
2019 · 0.0
2025 · 5.5
↑ 5.5
2019 2025
✦✦
03Who had the most to lose

2019 search reliance by vertical. The verticals most dependent on Google in 2019 are the same ones losing visibility in 2025/26.

Health & Medical87.9%
crushedMax Google dependency, max loss.
Travel72.6%
crushed32% of travel publishers lost >90% of traffic post-HCU.
Design & Dev69.5%
erodingLLMs now answer most developer queries directly.
Personal Finance67.8%
erodingAI Overviews absorb simple money questions.
Fashion & Beauty66.5%
stableTikTok rising, but search still rules the funnel.
Food & Recipes65.6%
stableRecipe schema still protects click-through.
Business & Marketing58.0%
erodingHeavy ChatGPT substitution for how-to content.
✦✦
04Claim by claim
●
Search is the #1 traffic source, across every niche.
Holds
●
Google drives ~8× more traffic than all social combined.
Stronger: now roughly 13×
●
Facebook sends more traffic than all other networks combined.
Understated: Facebook grew to 77% of social
●
Instagram drives under 1% of overall traffic.
Holds
◐
The average top blog gets 66% of its traffic from search.
Outdated: zero-click surge eroded this
◐
Health & Medical: 87.85% Google-reliant.
Outdated: the foundation cracked
◆
TikTok and Snapchat are absent from top-5 social.
Flipped: TikTok is now 5.5% and climbing fastest
◆
AI chatbots as a traffic source.
New category: didn't exist; now ~1% and growing
✦✦
05The takeaway
The 2019 framing survives.
Its specific numbers don't.
Search still dominates. Facebook still leads social. Instagram still barely refers. But Google now keeps two-thirds of its clicks for itself, X has collapsed, TikTok has arrived from nowhere, and AI assistants are a brand-new category of referrer.
← all field notes read ... times David Sierra