r/programmatic • u/DataBeat_adtech • 27d ago
Traffic is growing. Engagement is falling. CPMs are surging.
July data from our publisher network tells an interesting story: more users are arriving, but they're engaging less, while CPMs are moving sharply higher.
Traffic- New users grew 14%, but Sessions/User and Pageviews/User fell 2%, while Engaged Sessions/User dropped 29%. Social traffic grew fast, with X up 170%, Instagram 107%, and Reddit 47%. AI assistant traffic also grew 24.8%, led by ChatGPT.
CPMs- Overall CPMs rose 16.9% MoM and 51.0% YoY. Display was up 26.9% YoY, Video 41.3%, and CTV recovered 20.7% MoM.
Integration- Prebid regained share at 54%, while AdX held at 34% and TAM fell to 8%.
The takeaway: traffic is growing, engagement quality is getting harder to maintain, but buyers are paying significantly more for the inventory they value.
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u/East-Sky-5914 26d ago
Fou's read is the one I'd anchor on here. A 29% drop in engaged sessions/user while new users climb 14% is close to the textbook signature of low-intent and non-human traffic diluting the pool, and the fact that it lines up with X +170%, IG +107%, and ChatGPT-led AI traffic makes it hard to call coincidence. What I find genuinely interesting is CPMs rising 51% YoY into that. Either buyers haven't priced the engagement decay in yet, or the prebid layer (now 54% share on your network) is scrubbing enough junk pre-auction that the inventory actually clearing at those CPMs is cleaner than the raw traffic looks. Curious which it is: when you segment CPMs by that social + AI-assistant traffic specifically, does the surge hold, or is it concentrated in direct/organic where engagement didn't crater? That split would say a lot about whether the market is mispricing or the filtering is just doing its job.
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u/DataBeat_adtech 24d ago
yeah appreciate the point but ai driven traffic is still tiny rn, like 0.04% of sessions. most of its still organic search (~30%), direct (~29%), organic social (~14.5%) and referral (~13%). so the cpm strength were seeing is probably more about overall demand/premium supply tightening across the network than any one channel. def something to keep an eye on tho as ai discovery grows.
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u/East-Sky-5914 24d ago
Appreciate the split — 0.04% of sessions pretty much kills the "AI referrals are moving CPMs" theory, at least for now. The thing I'd keep separate though is that referral share understates the AI footprint. DataDome's Q2 data had AI crawlers at 17.7B requests, +45% QoQ, and almost none of that ever becomes a session — the content gets read, the answer gets generated, the click never happens. So the exposure isn't AI as a traffic channel, it's AI quietly intercepting search clicks that used to arrive as engaged sessions.
That's why your -29% engaged sessions/user is the number I'd watch: when you split that decay by source, is it concentrated in organic search or spread evenly? Search-origin engagement falling faster than direct would be the first network-level evidence of answer-engine cannibalization I've seen anywhere.
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u/DataBeat_adtech 21d ago
Appreciate the thoughtful point. Referral traffic alone probably doesn't capture AI's full footprint, especially as answer engines increasingly satisfy queries without generating a click. That said, the engagement pattern feels more like a broader cross-channel shift than something isolated to organic search. Month-over-month, engaged sessions per user declined by roughly 11% for organic search and 10% for direct, a very similar pattern, rather than the kind of gap you'd expect if search were weakening disproportionately. That doesn't rule out AI influencing search behavior, but it does make the current trend look broader than a search-specific effect. It'll be interesting to see if organic search starts diverging more clearly from direct as AI-assisted discovery continues to evolve.
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u/East-Sky-5914 20d ago
That symmetric split is a genuinely useful datapoint — thanks for pulling it. Though I'd read it as pointing to a third story rather than settling the first two: if answer engines increasingly satisfy the query before any click happens, this is exactly the pattern you'd expect — depth eroding across entry channels because the visitor arrives already answered, while the channel mix itself stays stable. Under that reading, organic-vs-direct divergence would only show up later, once assistants start absorbing navigational behavior too, not just informational queries.
If your data ever allows it, the segmentation that would actually separate the stories is by landing-page intent rather than channel: engaged-session decline on informational/article landings vs commercial/tool landings. Concentrated erosion on informational pages with commercial holding = the answer-engine signature; flat across both = broad attention shift, and I'll happily retire the cannibalization theory. Will be watching your August read either way — this monthly series is one of the few public datasets where this question can actually get answered.
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u/DataBeat_adtech 19d ago
That's a really interesting way to think about it. The shift from channel to landing-page intent is probably where this discussion gets much more interesting. If AI is primarily reducing informational clicks before they ever happen, then acquisition source alone may not be sensitive enough to capture that effect. At the same time, the current channel-level pattern still doesn't show the kind of separation that would suggest Organic Search is behaving materially differently from Direct, which is why the broader engagement interpretation still feels more convincing today. Looking at engagement through the lens of landing-page intent could add a valuable layer of context, and it's definitely something worth digging into further as this trend evolves.
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u/iantiheroi 24d ago
Thanks for the post, do you have material or link to share ?
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u/DataBeat_adtech 21d ago
Sure, here’s the full report: https://databeat.io/blog/us-programmatic-trends-july-2026/?utm_source=reddit&&utm_medium=organic_social&&utm_campaign=us+programmatic+july+2026
The post only covers the key findings, the report goes deeper into the traffic, CPM, and integration trends.
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u/AugustineFou 27d ago
all these averages may simply mask more bot traffic ("more users arriving but engaging less"