The cost of losing organic search now has a figure attached, and it arrived in the same week as a measurement of why. On 9 September, Adweek’s Mark Stenberg published Similarweb data showing that publishers in its Top 100 Media index spent an estimated $113 million on paid search in July 2026, buying back visits those sites once earned for nothing.

The figure is the first priced measure of a shift marketers have so far described in percentages. It is also more concentrated, and more cautiously sourced, than the headline number suggests. Read carelessly, $113 million a month says an industry has moved to paid acquisition. Read against the publisher-level breakdown, it says one company has, and the rest are some way behind.

What does the $113m figure actually cover?

Similarweb’s number is an estimate of paid search spend across the hundred largest media publishers it tracks, not a disclosure of what those publishers paid Google. It is up 41% year on year and 274% on three years ago. The traffic it bought came to 23.7 million visits in July, up 39% year on year and 148% over three years.

The gap between those two pairs of numbers is the finding. Spending has grown faster than the visits it produces on both timeframes, which is what happens when more bidders arrive for the same inventory. David Carr, Similarweb’s editor of news insights and research, dated the acceleration, describing a surge in pay-per-click spending that had ramped up “basically since April”.

Paid search has no equivalent of the organic slot it is replacing. An organic listing is allocated; a paid one is auctioned. As more publishers arrive to buy back the visibility they lost, they bid against each other for it, and the cost per visit rises for everyone in the auction, including the B2B advertisers who were already there. That is the mechanism sitting underneath a 274% spend increase against a 148% traffic increase.

One limit belongs on the record. Similarweb’s data reaches back three years, which is long enough to show the trend and too short to establish whether current spending is unprecedented. Publishers have bought traffic and run arbitrage for years.

Why is Forbes most of the total?

Forbes spent an estimated $72.2 million on paid search in July, according to the same Similarweb data, which is roughly 64% of the entire index’s $113 million. Its spend is up 34% year on year and more than eightfold over three years. The New York Times, the next figure Adweek names, more than doubled its paid search spend over twelve months to reach $11.3 million.

That distribution changes what the headline number means. A marketing team reading “$113 million” as evidence that the publishing industry has collectively pivoted to paid acquisition would be reading one company’s commerce-and-arbitrage model as a sector trend. The more defensible reading is that a small number of publishers with a direct route from a click to revenue are spending heavily, while the rest are spending more than they used to.

The organic side moved in the other direction across the same period and the same companies. Similarweb recorded organic traffic falling 26.7% year on year at Forbes, 28.9% at CNN and 24.1% at USA Today. The correlation is easy to see and harder to prove: the data shows organic falling and paid rising at the same publishers, not that each paid pound is replacing a specific lost visit.

What happened to the organic supply in the same week?

The People Also Ask box, one of the last large organic units on the results page still routing clicks to third-party sites, is now almost entirely answered by AI. Search Engine Roundtable reported on 9 September that two independent trackers had measured it. Mark Williams-Cook of AlsoAsked, working from a sample of 19.2 million English-language queries logged during 2026, found AI Overviews inside 86% of People Also Ask answers in August and 97% in the first week of September. Saeed Khosravi of Allintitle put it at 100% from August, using its Also Ask Miner tool.

Fourteen months earlier the AlsoAsked figure was around 12%. Neither measurement comes from Google, neither publishes a full methodology, and both cover English-language queries only, so 97% is the number with a stated sample behind it and the one worth quoting. Google has confirmed nothing.

For a B2B content programme, People Also Ask was the route to a second listing on page one for a page that could not reach the top three. Question-shaped content now gets read inside the box rather than on the site that wrote it. That is the supply side of the same equation the publisher spending describes: the free slots are closing while the paid ones get more expensive, and The Helm has already reported that AI Overviews cut clicks by 39.8% and take the more engaged visitors, and that Google has begun auto-expanding those Overviews so organic links sit below the fold.

The measurement a marketing team can run this month is narrow and useful. Pull the pages that earn most of their impressions from question queries, compare impressions against clicks across July, August and September, and treat a widening gap as the box absorbing the answer rather than a ranking problem to fix. Separately, SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data put 68.01% of Google searches ending without a click across the first four months of 2026, a panel figure that should not be stacked against zero-click studies built on different methods.

Similarweb’s tracking begins three years ago, so the question of how far above a longer-run normal $113 million a month sits cannot be answered from this data.