“The centrality of the website is declining for many brands.”

That is one takeaway from a new report by Enders Analysis, presented by CEO and director of publishing and tech Douglas McCabe at the PPA Festival Wednesday morning.

“The website itself is no longer the primary destination for consumers as it struggles to meet expectations while AI erodes publisher monetisation,” the report concludes.

As McCabe outlined, the “death of the website” appears nigh as media brands compete in an “asymmetric battle with the creator economy”; personalised, algorithmic social platforms are now a primary means by which users find information online.

Enders Analysis found that half of all publishers have reported at least some search traffic decline over the past year. Their report described AI overviews as “cannibalising website visits”.

The findings were revealed by Enders Analysis, a research company, which attributed the falling number of click-throughs to “an onslaught” from social media platforms and artificial intelligence summaries produced by search engines.

Half of publishers polled reported a decline in search traffic over the past year.

“Search traffic is no longer a given,” Douglas McCabe, a media analyst, said in the Rewriting the Media Playbook report.

“Many publishers have used their websites to replicate the article format. But the website itself is no longer the primary destination for consumers as it struggles to meet expectations, while AI erodes monetisation.”

“Publishers are losing visibility and value as their content is used but not rewarded,” McCabe said.

The company’s share of the UK broadband market has fallen to 11 per cent, from 14 per cent in 2022, according to research by Enders Analysis.

Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders, said altnets had pushed broadband prices to “uneconomic levels” in the UK. 

“TalkTalk, in particular, has been at the sharp end of this pressure as both the altnets and TalkTalk appeal to the lower end of the market,” she added.

Karen Egan, Enders’ head of telecoms, said the trend was also partly due to the cost of living crisis, with consumers more likely to use a cheaper mobile alternative — something that many MVNOs claim to offer. 

Egan also noted that in addition to consumer competition, an additional battle was also growing between network operators jostling to sign deals to bring virtual operators on to their networks. 

“MVNOs are getting increasingly good wholesale deals from the network operators, who are really struggling for other sources of revenue growth and have decent levels of spare network capacity,” she said. 

Hamish Low, an analyst at the research firm Enders Analysis, told Business Insider that the "macro uncertainty" triggered by Trump's administration would weigh on tech companies.

He said it would make investors more serious about the "questions that were already growing" about Big Tech's major bets and their potential for returns.

"Impressive capabilities at the frontier of research aren't translating into either people's experiences of AI products or the kinds of returns that match the investments going in," Low told BI.