- −10% traffic to the top 10,000 websites since late 2022
- 44.1% share of visits now taken by the top 20 sites
- 17% of internet users discover brands through AI tools
Buyers are still looking for property online. What’s changing is where they look. A new report from DataReportal, Digital 2027: The Steady Decline of the World Wide Web, finds that traffic to the world’s top 10,000 websites has fallen more than 10% since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Time spent on those sites is down 11.2% in just two years.
That sounds alarming. Read closely, though, the report isn’t about people losing interest in content. It’s about content reaching them differently: through apps, social feeds, in-app browsers and AI assistants. For agents, that distinction matters. Your vendors’ buyers haven’t disappeared, but the places to reach them are shifting.
Here’s what the data says, what it doesn’t, and what it means for how you market a listing.
01 Attention moved into the feed
Most of the decline is on mobile. Over two years, mobile web visits fell 11%, while desktop visits slipped less than 1%. People haven’t put their phones down. They’re spending that time inside apps instead of typing addresses into a browser.
Even when people do land on a web page from their phone, it’s often without leaving an app. Cloudflare data cited in the report shows just over one in four Android web visits now happen inside an embedded browser, such as Instagram’s or Facebook’s, rather than in Chrome or Safari. The author’s read is that mobile browsing is becoming “less intentional and more spontaneous.”
They weren’t searching for that home. It found them.
That describes how a lot of property discovery already works. A buyer scrolls past a listing, taps it, looks at the photos and moves on, or books an inspection.
02 Fewer, bigger destinations
The traffic that remains is concentrating. The top 20 websites now take 44.1% of all visits among the top 10,000, up from 39.4% in late 2022. Their combined traffic has held roughly steady, while sites ranked 5,001 to 10,000 lost 22.9%. The number of sites drawing more than 10 million monthly visits fell 18.3% in two years.
The big platforms are holding their audiences and everyone else is sharing a smaller pool. For property marketing, that suggests a simple test for any channel: is it where buyers already spend their time, or does it depend on them making a special trip?
03 Display ads are thinning; search is holding
Ad-supported websites are taking the hardest hit. Sites running Google AdSense lost 14.8% of their visits over two years, more than double the 6.8% drop across all top sites. Leave YouTube out and the figure is 18.7%, close to one in five monetisable visits gone. The author estimates that adds up to trillions of lost ad impressions a year.
For anyone buying banner or programmatic placements to promote a listing, that means less inventory reaching fewer people.
Search is a different story. Search engine visits fell only 4.3% over two years, a much gentler decline than the web overall, and 86.4% of internet users outside China still used a search engine in the past month. Search remains a reliable way to catch buyers who already know what they want.
04 AI is becoming a discovery channel
AI assistants are now a real, if still secondary, way people find brands. About 17% of internet users say they discover brands through AI tools, compared with 24.3% through brand websites. Among 16 to 24 year olds, AI tools have already overtaken brand websites as a place to research purchases.
One detail stands out: brand and product websites are among the sources AI models cite most when answering questions about products. AI assistants don’t invent information. They draw on structured, accurate, published data.
Property is likely to follow the same path. As more buyers ask an assistant to find three-bedroom homes near a good school, the listings that surface will be the ones whose details are complete, consistent and published at the source.
05 What the data doesn’t say
A few caveats are worth keeping in mind. The figures are global, and the report has no Australia or New Zealand breakdown, so local patterns may differ. Several measures, including total web users, are estimates built from proxies rather than direct counts. Some trends are also noisy: mobile’s share of traffic fell sharply through mid-2026, then showed signs of a partial rebound.
The web isn’t dying, either. Page views among top sites actually rose more than 2% year on year, and brand websites are still one of the most common ways people research a purchase. Almost one in three people visit a brand’s site while weighing up a decision.
The author’s own advice is to avoid predictions and build systems that can adapt quickly. That’s sensible guidance for property marketing too.
06 What this means for agents
None of this requires a dramatic change. It does reward a few deliberate habits.
- Put listings where buyers already scroll. Social feeds are where attention has moved. Campaigns that reach people there, without asking them to go looking, match how browsing now works.
- Make the tap count. Many buyers will land on your listing inside an app’s built-in browser. Fast, mobile-first pages that work there keep the momentum going.
- Be selective with display spend. Open-web ad inventory is shrinking. Check that every placement is reaching real buyers, not just filling a schedule.
- Keep listing data clean and complete. Accurate, structured details serve portals and search today, and AI assistants tomorrow.
- Stay flexible. Channels will keep shifting. Systems that can adapt quickly matter more than any single prediction.
At ListingLogic, we’ve been running automated vendor-paid digital campaigns for real estate offices since 2012, and this report matches what we see: buyers respond to listings that meet them where they already are.
The web is changing shape, but the job hasn’t. Get the right home in front of the right buyer, at the moment they’re paying attention.
Source: Simon Kemp, Digital 2027: The Steady Decline of the World Wide Web, DataReportal, 21 October 2026.