Tuesday morning, coffee, analytics tab. Same ritual for years. Lately I open it the way you open a bill you already know the number on.

The shape of the drop is the interesting part. It wasn’t everything at once. It was specific pages, and once I sorted them properly, the pattern was almost embarrassing.

Everything that answered a question in one paragraph is gone. Definitions. “What is X.” “How many Y in Z.” Those posts used to bring steady, boring, reliable traffic for years. They now bring almost nothing, because the answer sits at the top of the results page and nobody needs to click through to a stranger’s website to read one sentence they already have.

Asked about a publisher’s claim that commercial operators must pay to use its material, a Perplexity spokesperson gave a four-word answer in substance: facts aren’t copyrightable. It’s a real defence, it’s been good law for a very long time, and it may be the wrong argument for what these systems actually do.

The copyright fight so far has been about training. Did the model ingest protected work to learn from it, and is that fair use. That question is enormous, unresolved and slow, and it’s being litigated in dozens of cases.