Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., on May 14, 2024. While many factors often drive traffic fluctuations, publishers say the introduction of Google’s AI Overviews has led to dramatic declines for news outlets and other online information sources.
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
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Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
When Google unveiled AI Overviews last year, online publishers worried that the AI-generated blurbs in the top spot of search results would spark precipitous declines in traffic and gut the business model of vast reaches of the web.
Now, there is growing evidence validating those fears.
New research shows the web traffic that publishers have long relied on is significantly slowing, thanks to AI-generated summaries and the rise of AI chatbots.
Traffic to CNN’s website has dropped about 30% from a year ago. Business Insider’s and HuffPost’s sites saw traffic plunges around 40% in the same period, according to figures from digital market data firm Similarweb.
While many factors influence traffic fluctuations, publishers say the introduction of Google’s AI Overviews in May 2024 has packed a punch.
Helen Havlak, the publisher of The Verge, a tech news site and Vox Media’s most visited homepage, said when people see AI summaries, they visit sites for information less often.
“The Verge’s Google traffic has been declining, and I would say a lot of that decline has lined up pretty clearly with the rise of AI Overviews,” Havlak said.
For online publishers, it is a Faustian bargain, said Columbia University’s Klaudia Jaźwińska, who researches how AI is upending the news industry. Traffic and money are lost when stories are turned into AI snippets, yet without Google, the situation is even more dire.
“Publishers are kind of in a bind because if you want to opt out of AI Overviews, you opt out of Google Search entirely,” she said.
Where does this lead?
Publishers worry about a time when Google stops sending traffic to websites altogether. Tech observers and publishers have dubbed such a scenario “zero-click” searching, or Google Zero. It’s an event that would be catastrophic to many major news sites and other online publishers that rely on traffic-based online advertising revenue, according to advocates for the media organizations.
“Google is using our content without compensation, offering no meaningful way to opt out without disappearing from search entirely — and then turning around and using that same content to compete with us,” said Danielle Coffey, who leads the News/Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,000 outlets. “It’s parasitic, it’s unsustainable and it poses a real existential threat to many in our industry.”
Some publishers are taking AI companies to court. About a dozen lawsuits have been filed against AI firms, including The New York Times‘ federal copyright suit against OpenAI. Other major news organizations, like News Corp. and Axel Springer, are striking licensing deals with AI companies.
An example of Google’s AI Overviews producing an AI-driven answer above search results.
NPR
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NPR
Google has said AI Overviews is popular with users, leading analysts to the natural conclusion that it will likely become more prevalent.
The company would not provide exact numbers on what percentage of searches use AI Overviews, but researchers estimate that about 20% of Google searches now include an AI blurb at the top of a search page.
Publishers say the more that this percentage ramps up, the more threatening the situation becomes to the already ailing world of advertising-supported online media.
Google, meanwhile, is bringing in new money from advertisements tied to AI Overviews, which is helping to boost its overall search profits.
How to survive? Become more like social media
For The Verge, this new reality means the outlet is doubling down on subscriptions and pushing podcasts and newsletters and making its website more like social media — allowing readers to follow writers and topics. The site now features a short-form feed mimicking an infinite news scroll to try to keep people from leaving for Bluesky or X.
For years, digital media has relied on search engines and social media to distribute stories. Whether it’s gaming Facebook’s algorithm or Google’s search ranking, news sites have changed how headlines and stories are written to maximize reach on platforms. News sites, however, have been burned too many times, like when Facebook deprioritizes news, or when Google changes its algorithm to surface fewer news sites, said The Verge’s Havlak.
“One answer is that publishers need to behave more like platforms in and of themselves and play more platform games,” said Havlak.
But before you can keep people on your site, publishers need to get them there, which is becoming an increasingly vexing proposition.
A recent Pew Research Center study found that when people see an AI Overview, they’re half as likely to ever click a link from Google. And after people see an AI Overview answer, they’re more likely to end their browsing sessions. Havlak is seeing this play out.
“The extinction-level event is already here. And a bunch of small publishers have already gone out of business,” Havlak said.
Specialized publications that have a steady stream of subscriber revenue are more insulated than sites that rely exclusively on traffic, like the travel blog The Planet D, which shut down after its traffic dropped 90% following Google’s introduction of AI Overviews.
Google said the methodology of the new Pew study is flawed. In a statement, the company said it continues to send billions of clicks to websites every day. When someone does click on a link from an AI Overview, the clicks are “higher quality,” according to Google, meaning readers stick around on the website longer. Havlak, for one, says her site’s internal data has not backed that up.
Websites are both resisting and embracing AI
Some software companies are trying to help online publishers fight back.
Cloudflare, a cloud-computing and security firm, is pushing a “pay-as-you-crawl” system in which AI bots, be it Google’s or that of any AI company, must first pay a website before scanning its contents for AI blurbs.
“If we are going to have an increasingly AI-driven web, which I think is inevitable, the business model of the web needs to change, and content creators need to get compensated in a different way,” Matthew Prince, the co-founder and chief executive of Cloudflare, told NPR. “If content creators can’t get compensated for their content, they’ll stop creating content. And I think we all will suffer as a result of that.”
Other attempts to block AI web crawlers have not always been successful. So for other publishers, the plan is not to resist but to try to use AI to stand out.
A tech startup called Scrunch AI assists publishers and companies in being highlighted by leading AI tools. “We’re seeing companies that are desperate to get their content consumed by AI models,” said Chris Andrew, who leads Scrunch AI.
That response is perhaps better suited for companies selling a product, rather than news publishers where the information is the commodity.
Researcher Jaźwińska said more people gleaning answers from AI, rather than clicking links, is forcing news websites to suffer or adapt. One thing should give the industry some comfort, she said: AI is no replacement for the fact-finding of human reporters.
“News content is of great demand by AI companies, and that won’t go away,” she said. “Chatbots cannot report. That’s something journalists can do and robots cannot.”