What we measured
Four metrics per domain per year, 2024 through 2026, all from the same annual Common Crawl webgraph releases plus Google's CrUX popularity data: referring domains (converted to within-year percentile), PageRank position, harmonic centrality position (how central the site sits in the web's link structure, not just how many links it has), and CrUX popularity rank. Positions are normalized by each year's graph size, since the graph itself went from 173M to 121M ranked domains over the window.
The category gradient, controlled
Every category below started in the same 85-95th percentile authority band in 2024. The differences in where they ended up are category effects, not starting-position effects:
All categories started in the 85-95th percentile band. Real estate declined roughly 5.5x faster than SaaS from the same starting line.
| Category | Median change | Share dropping 10+ points |
|---|---|---|
| Real estate | -6.1 | 36.5% |
| Wellness and beauty | -5.4 | 32.5% |
| Retail | -5.4 | 31.5% |
| Automotive | -4.6 | 28.1% |
| Restaurants | -4.1 | 23.6% |
| B2B services | -2.6 | 17.6% |
| Nonprofits | -1.6 | 10.7% |
| SaaS | -1.1 | 11.9% |
n = 1,717 to 45,698 per category. Local and physical business categories decline fastest; institutional and digital-native categories hold.
Subcategories separate even harder
The same controlled comparison at the subcategory level (minimum 1,000 sites each) spreads wider than the categories do, and it splits within categories: sushi restaurants declined -6.5 while breweries declined -2.0.
Same starting band for every subcategory. Over half of apartment-community, optometry, and used-car-dealer sites dropped 10+ points; roofers and HVAC held.
| Subcategory | Median change | Share dropping 10+ points |
|---|---|---|
| Used car dealers | -10.2 | 50.5% |
| Optometry practices | -10.6 | 51.6% |
| Apartment communities | -10.6 | 52.5% |
| Hair salons | -7.6 | 41.7% |
| Clothing retail | -7.9 | 42.9% |
| HVAC contractors | -0.5 | 9.1% |
| Roofing contractors | -0.4 | 9.8% |
Over half of the apartment-community, optometry, and used-car-dealer sites in the band dropped 10+ percentile points in two years. Roofers and HVAC barely moved.
Centrality falls harder than link counts
Harmonic centrality measures where a site sits in the web's link structure rather than how many links it has. On this metric the local decline roughly doubles: real estate's median harmonic percentile fell -14.3 and wellness/beauty fell -11.3, versus -1.1 for SaaS. Local business sites are not just collecting fewer links; they are drifting toward the periphery of the graph, further from the well-connected core that crawlers and AI systems traverse first. PageRank tells the same story as the link counts (SaaS at +0.1 was the only positive median we found on any metric), which is expected since PageRank is link-volume-weighted. Harmonic is the metric that adds new information.
Centrality (position in the web's link structure) declines roughly twice as fast as raw link counts for local categories.
Traffic follows a different map than links
Here is the part that stops this from being a simple 'local businesses are losing' story. We ran the same category comparison on CrUX popularity movement (all sites starting from the same popularity tier), and the ordering changed: home services sites hold their link authority better than almost anyone but were among the worst on popularity decline (47.7% dropped a tier), while automotive sites bleed link authority yet came closest to net traffic gains of any category. And content/media sites hold both their links and their centrality while losing popularity faster than any other category at the top tier (51.5% of their well-ranked sites dropped). Sites that keep their citations while losing their clicks is exactly the pattern you'd expect as AI search answers more queries without a visit. Links and traffic are different assets moving on different schedules, which matches what our earlier backlinks research found at the individual-site level.
A different ordering than the link-authority chart: home services holds links but loses traffic; automotive loses links but holds traffic; content/media holds links and centrality while bleeding popularity.
How to read your own numbers
The single most important reading rule: the median site in almost every category drifted down, because the linked-domain pool keeps growing with fresh sites while incumbents age. A raw decline is the baseline condition of the web, not a verdict on your site. The question that matters is whether you are declining faster or slower than your category's median. A restaurant that lost 3 percentile points matched its cohort exactly; an HVAC contractor that lost 3 points fell five times faster than its peers. Same number, opposite meanings.
Method and caveats
Panel: every registrable domain in Stackra's 1.1M-site US corpus, joined to the Common Crawl domain-level webgraphs for 2024, 2025, and 2026 (the April-June release each year) and to CrUX popularity data. Absence from a crawl year is recorded as absent, never as zero links. Percentiles are computed within each year's graph among domains with at least one inbound link. Known bias we can't fully remove: Common Crawl covers small local sites more thinly than big ones, which can inflate local-category declines; the starting-band control reduces this but does not eliminate it. Category labels come from the corpus's Gemini-verified 25-type taxonomy, documented in the corpus case study.