Google’s AI Search Features Reduce Traffic to Online Publishers

In 2024, Google introduced AI Overviews, an AI‑generated summary that appears at the top of search results and is followed by links to sources it deems most useful. The feature quickly displaced many news sites from the first page of Google Search, with the Press Gazette reporting that AI Overviews appeared for nearly a quarter of news‑related queries in May 2024 and were already pushing out previously top‑ranked media outlets by August. In May 2025, Google launched AI Mode, replacing the standard search interface with a chatbot‑style interface that delivers detailed summaries from web results. The shift has led to measurable declines in search traffic for major publishers: Business Insider, The Washington Post, HuffPost, and the Wall Street Journal all saw traffic drops since 2022, while The New York Times’ search‑driven traffic fell from 44 % to 35.5 % over three years, according to Similarweb data. These changes have sparked concerns from the News/Media Alliance, which warned the new AI‑centric model could be “catastrophic” for web traffic, and have raised regulatory and legal questions about the future of online publishing.