Organic lost share. Paid quietly picked up the bill

Traffic that used to arrive free now has a price on it. Budgets that were correctly sized eighteen months ago are short today, and nobody did anything wrong.

What actually changed

Across every vertical studied, organic click share fell by double digit percentage points over the last year, with paid absorbing much of the difference. The demand did not go anywhere. The route it arrives by did.

Why your cost per sale drifted

If a tenth of your customers used to find you without you paying, and now they do not, your blended cost per acquisition rises even though every campaign is performing exactly as it did before. Most teams respond by auditing the campaigns, which are not the problem.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

Either the budget goes up to hold the same volume, or the volume falls, or the conversion rate has to do more work. There is no fourth option, and pretending otherwise is how a year gets wasted.

I check these against the original source before publishing, and I will send you the source if you want to see it. I do not quote a number I have not read myself.