So then 72% of traffic comes from outside the site - search or referral traffic. That's higher than I would have guessed given how often I go down the rabbit hole
A lot of people just want a quick answer. Of course Google is trying to scrape the value of those sorts of visitors away via the knowledge graph & featured snippets, but
that site ranks for so many keywords.
And for many people going back to Google & doing another search again is easier than using the internal navigation of most websites, particularly for information-dense pages with dozens to hundreds of links on them.
As mainstream media sites erect paywalls, for informational search queries people will have even greater incentive to start at Google rather than follow internal links, to both save their allotted pageviews & to be able to click on another listing if they go beyond the monthly pageviews for that publisher.