Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode drive steep declines in publisher traffic

Google's effort to rebuild search around AI has upended the long-standing arrangement between the search engine and the websites that fill its index, according to an analysis published by The Verge. AI-generated summaries now sit above traditional links for a growing share of queries, and publishers say the resulting loss of referral traffic is forcing them to rethink how they survive.

How AI took over the results page

Google introduced AI Overviews in 2024, placing a machine-written summary of web content at the very top of Search while pushing citations below it. According to The Verge, publishers objected from the start: the News/Media Alliance warned the feature would be "catastrophic" for web traffic. An investigation by the Press Gazette found the summaries appeared for nearly a quarter of news-related searches by May 2024, and by August they were displacing media outlets that had previously held the top positions for certain queries.

Google went further in May 2025 with AI Mode, which replaces the familiar list of links with a chatbot-style interface that produces detailed summaries drawn from results across the web.

The traffic numbers publishers report

The early warnings appear to have materialized. Citing a June 2025 report from The Wall Street Journal, The Verge notes that traffic to Business Insider, The Washington Post, HuffPost, and the WSJ itself has declined since 2022. Similarweb data cited in that report showed search-driven traffic to The New York Times falling from 44 percent to 35.5 percent over three years.

A separate Digiday report on members of Digital Content Next, a trade association whose members include Bloomberg, The Associated Press, Condé Nast, and Vox Media, found that 19 members lost between 1 and 25 percent of their Google traffic between May and June 2025. DMG Media, which owns the Daily Mail and Metro, told the UK's Competition and Markets Authority that click-through rates dropped by as much as 89 percent between June and July 2025. Pew Research, meanwhile, found that people are less inclined to click through to other websites when an AI Overview is present.

Google sees it differently

Those figures clash with Google's own account. According to The Verge, Google Search head Liz Reid said last year that click volume remained "relatively stable" and that AI search sends more clicks to different kinds of sites, particularly those featuring forums, videos, podcasts, and posts from other users. Nick Fox, the company's senior vice president of knowledge and information, told the BBC: "From our point of view, the web is thriving."

Legal challenges have mostly failed

Publishers around the world have sued Google over the traffic losses, but with limited success so far. US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed an antitrust case brought by Chegg and Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and The Verge itself. The same judge also rejected a proposed class action over AI Overviews filed by Arkansas newspapers.

Publishers adapt, Google makes concessions

With referrals shrinking, publishers are leaning more heavily on social media, newsletters, and subscriptions, The Verge reports. Google now broadly offers a toggle that lets sites opt out of appearing in AI Mode and AI Overviews without harming their visibility in standard search, an option it rolled out following an order from UK regulators.

Google has also begun making sources more prominent inside its AI features: hovering over a link now shows a pop-up listing related articles and images, and in-line links are being placed higher up in responses more often. The company says 400 publishers, including The Washington Post, CNN, Axios, and the Financial Times, have joined its News AI pilot program, which licenses content to build new AI features. Reports from The Information and Digiday indicate Google is also testing a program that pays publishers whose material appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The pressure is not limited to news outlets. The Wall Street Journal reports that Reddit is considering cutting Google off entirely as its own traffic declines, and the nonprofit Common Sense Media argues the AI summaries pose an "unacceptable" risk to children by failing to respond appropriately to kids in crisis. Meanwhile, The Verge notes, AI Overviews have started expanding automatically for some queries instead of waiting for a "Show more" click, burying traditional blue links even deeper on the page.

Why it matters

For two decades, search has been the main way people discover content on the open web, and referral traffic has been the economic engine behind free online publishing. If AI summaries answer users' questions without a click, the model that funded news sites, guides, and forums begins to unravel. Compensation pilots and more visible citations may soften the damage, but the lawsuits, regulatory interventions, and threats from platforms like Reddit suggest the fight over who benefits when AI summarizes the web is only getting started.