Techpoint Africa leads Nigeria’s tech media rankings amid AI-induced traffic slowdown
The report insists that this decline in page visits does not reflect reduced relevance, but rather a recalibration driven by artificial intelligence.
A recently released report, RANKED 2026 by SquirrelPR, has shown that the African digital media space is evolving, moving past the previous tenets that held sway: pageviews and clicks.
The report highlights a 26.2% decline in total readership traffic in 2025 across Nigeria’s digital media ecosystem, with total traffic across all digital media platforms in Nigeria dropping from over 1.04 billion visits in 2024 to just 769 million in 2025.
“The old model of digital media was built on clicks. That model is breaking down,” said Jonah Solomon, Co-founder of SquirrelPR. “Today, influence is defined by authority, trust, and the ability to shape conversations, even when users don’t click through.”
Artificial intelligence is identified as the main force reshaping the digital media landscape, with AI search overviews answering user queries, thereby reducing the incentive to visit websites directly. Ironically, these websites remain the primary source of information as AI crawls them to provide answers to users’ search queries.
The report insists that this decline in page visits does not reflect reduced relevance, but rather a recalibration driven by artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, Chief Scientist, Search at Google, Pandu Nayak, disagrees.
“Relevant words from his mouth,” he told Techpoint Africa during a recent How Search Works Roundtable.
“There have definitely been studies that claim significant drops in publisher traffic,” he stated. “I believe that we have not yet seen a reliable study of that sort because our evidence does not show that publisher traffic is cratering because of AI overviews. In fact, , the reality is that there are many other reasons that affect publisher traffic that have nothing to do with AI or AI overviews.”
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