Google's AI Search Features Threaten Publishers' Traffic and Revenue

Google's AI search features are killing traffic to publishers | TechCrunch

Google's AI Overviews and other AI-powered tools, including chatbots, are devastating traffic for news publishers, per a Wall Street Journal report. Now that people can simply ask a chatbot for answers - sometimes generated from news content taken without a publisher's knowledge - there's no need to click on Google's blue links. That means referrals to news sites are plummeting, cutting off the traffic publishers need to sustain quality journalism. Google released AI Overviews, its search result summary tool, last year. Its rollout hit traffic to sites like vacation guides, health tips, and product reviews, per the Journal. AI Mode, Google's ChatGPT competitor, is expected to hit traffic harder. It responds in a conversational tone with fewer external links. For The New York Times, the share of traffic from organic search to the paper's desktop and mobile sites fell to 36.5% in April 2025, down from 44% three years earlier, according to data from Similarweb cited in the Wall Street Journal report. Google likes to tell a different story. During Google's developer conference in May, the company said its AI Overviews feature has boosted search traffic -- though maybe not for publishers. Publishers like The Atlantic and The Washington Post have spoken about the need for the industry to shift business models, and fast, to combat this threat to journalism. Some have resorted to doing content-sharing deals with AI companies for additional revenue streams. The Times most recently inked a deal with Amazon to license its editorial content to train the tech giant's AI platforms. Several publishers, including The Atlantic, have signed on to work with OpenAI. AI startup Perplexity's plan is to share advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a query.

'This is coming for everyone': A new kind of AI bot takes over the web

As consumers switch from Google search to ChatGPT, a new kind of bot is scraping data for AI. People are replacing Google search with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, a major shift that has unleashed a new kind of bot loose on the web. To offer users a tidy AI summary instead of Google's "10 blue links," companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have started sending out bots to retrieve and recap content in real time. They are scraping webpages and loading relevant content into the AI's memory and "reading" far more content than a human ever would. According to data shared exclusively with The Washington Post, traffic from retrieval bots grew 49 percent in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024. The data is from TollBit, a New York-based start-up that helps news publishers monitor and make money when AI companies use their content. TollBit's report, based on data from 160 websites -- half of which are run by national and local news organizations -- suggests that the growth of bots that retrieve information when a user prompts an AI model is on an exponential curve. "It starts with publishers, but this is coming for everyone," Toshit Panigrahi, CEO and co-founder of TollBit, said in an interview. Panigrahi said that this kind of bot traffic, which can be hard for websites to detect, reflects growing demand for content, even as AI tools devastate traffic to news sites and other online platforms. "Human eyeballs to your site decreased. But the net amount of content access, we believe, fundamentally is going to explode," he said. A spokesperson for OpenAI said that referral traffic to publishers from ChatGPT searches may be lower in quantity but that it reflects a stronger user intent compared with casual web browsing. To capitalize on this shift, websites will need to reorient themselves to AI visitors rather than human ones, Panigrahi said. But he also acknowledged that squeezing payment for content when AI companies argue that scraping online data is fair use will be an uphill climb, especially as leading players make their newest AI visitors even harder to identify. Debate around the AI industry's use of online content has centered on the gargantuan amounts of text needed to train the AI models that power tools like ChatGPT. To obtain that data, tech companies use bots that scrape the open web for free, which has led to a raft of lawsuits alleging copyright theft from book authors and media companies, including a New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. Other news publishers have opted for licensing deals. (In April, The Washington Post inked a deal with OpenAI.) In the past eight months, as chatbots have evolved to incorporate features like web search and "reasoning" to answer more complex queries, traffic for retrieval bots has skyrocketed. It grew 2.5 times as fast as traffic for bots that scrape data for training between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to TollBit's report. Panigrahi said TollBit's data may underestimate the magnitude of this change because it doesn't reflect bots that AI companies send out on behalf of AI "agents" that can complete tasks on a user's behalf, like ordering takeout from DoorDash. The start-up's findings also add a new dimension to mounting evidence that the modern internet -- optimized for Google search results and social media algorithms -- will have to be restructured as the popularity of AI answers grows. "To think of it as, 'Well, I'm optimizing my search for humans' is missing out on a big opportunity," he said. Installing TollBit's analytics platform is free for news publishers, and the company has more than 1,000 clients, many of which are struggling with these seismic changes, according to data in the report. Although news publishers and other websites can implement blockers to prevent various AI bots from scraping their content, TollBit found that more than 26 million AI scrapes bypassed those blockers in March alone. Some AI companies claim bots for AI agents don't need to follow bot instructions because they are acting on behalf of a user. Mark Howard, chief operating officer for the media company Time, a TollBit client, said the start-up's traffic data has helped Time negotiate content licensing deals with AI companies including OpenAI and the search engine Perplexity. But the market to fairly compensate publishers is far from established, Howard said. "The vast majority of the AI bots out there absolutely are not sourcing the content through any kind of paid mechanism. ... There is a very, very long way to go."

The end of Google traffic is coming faster than expected

Generative AI is breaking the dynamic that built the digital-publishing business. Since the mid-aughts, the link economy has defined how traffic moves across the internet. Publishers created search-optimized content, and Google (GOOGL-1.57%), in its turn, sent traffic to their sites. This search traffic sharply increased readership, augmenting dedicated daily visitors with a steady pipeline of more random seekers that publishers aimed to turn into regular readers. But now, with Google's rollout of AI Overviews and its even more recent introduction of AI Mode -- which competes with ChatGPT by providing synthesized answers to complex questions, heading off the need for links - publishers are cut out of the loop. That's despite the fact that Google continues to feed on their content, mining articles and digests for its agent-style answers. All of this means publishers are seeing a tremendous drop in eyeballs, clicks, and readers. Traffic to sites like HuffPost (BZFD+2.12%), the Washington Post, and Business Insider has dropped by more than 50% in three years, per Similarweb. Layoffs have followed. Business Insider just cut 21% of staff, making headlines. Meanwhile, over the last years, 1 out of every 10 editors and journalists have lost their jobs according to Bureau of Labor statistics data -- a timeline that directly overlaps with the traffic drop. In response, publishers are racing to build more direct relationships with readers through newsletters and events, a set of plays and pivots that have arguably already been in the works longer than generative AI has been available to everyday internet users. "We have to develop new strategies," Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, told the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic is operating on the assumption that search traffic will go to zero. Whether or not every internet publication can become a conference business or be sustained by its newsletter portfolio is an open question. One thing is sure: a cost structure that obtains content without incurring the cost of content has a tough-to-beat advantage. As newsletter writer Byrne Hobart recently put it, search "remains the best business in history" -- a high-margin cash machine that employs user behavior to improve itself, monetize intent, and reinforce its dominance over both creators and consumers. Everyone from SEO consultants to local restaurants has learned to speak its language. So it's no wonder Google stock is up some 7,000% since its 2004 IPO, a trajectory that has seen its valuation climb from about $20 billion to well over $2 trillion. But will Google's advantage disappear if content producers themselves die off? It might. Eventually, even the best search engine needs something to search. AI-generated answers still require fresh, high-quality inputs, much of which continue to be created by publishers, the same ones now being squeezed so hard. If Google traffic keeps falling, publishers may have stronger incentive to lock down their content, erect paywalls, or block scrapers entirely. Some already are. That makes the current moment look less like a shift in traffic patterns and more like a complete reorientation of the internet's most basic business workings. As search evolves into something more agent-like, it risks cannibalizing the very ecosystem that made it powerful.

Google's AI Is Actively Destroying the News Media

Google's pivot to AI-powered search is proving disastrous for the digital news media landscape. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company's latest tools, including its wildly hallucinating AI Overviews and chatbot-style AI Mode, are causing the traffic being sent to publishers to plummet as users no longer feel the need to click through to the actual source of information, cutting already-slammed journalists off from ad revenue and subscriptions. It's an existential threat. News publications, already gutted by the internet, have been hit hard as they try to adapt to a post-organic-search world. Per the WSJ, search traffic to Business Insider's media empire fell by a whopping 55 percent between April 2022 and April 2025. Last month, the company cut roughly 21 percent of its staff, with CEO Barbara Peng noting that it had to "endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control." How to respond to this existential threat remains a major point of contention. It's a thorny debate, with publishers accusing the AI industry of exploiting their content without ever fairly remunerated. Plummeting traffic due to AI-enhanced search on Google is only exacerbating the tension. Google is under threat from AI itself. Apple executive Eddy Cue admitted in federal court earlier this year that Google searches in the company's Safari browser had fallen for the first time in 20 years, indicating the end of traditional search as we know it could be nigh. Confusingly, Google has since disputed the claim and has remained adamant that its number of total searches is still going up -- while going all-in on its glitchy AI products. "This is the moment that propels us forward in our ability to achieve our mission and really deliver a transformed search experience for users," Google's head of knowledge and information division Nick Fox told Adweek. The digital media landscape and Google are now caught in an unfortunate race to the bottom. The tech giant's search and AI features rely on a steady stream of news and original content. But by cutting the creators of that material out of a once lucrative organic search-driven revenue source, that stream could soon be reduced to a trickle, if not an incestuous swamp of AI-generated nonsense. Well-established outlets will likely weather the storm better. Research revealed last week that Google's AI Overviews favors major news outlets, while smaller publications struggle for visibility. Meanwhile, the media industry has no other option but to look for new business models in light of an existential threat. Legal challenges to Google's indiscriminate scraping of copyrighted materials are likely to continue to crop up as well. "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue," said trade association News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey in a statement last month, following Google's announcement of its AI Mode feature. "Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft."

'This is coming for everyone': A new kind of AI bot takes over the web

People are replacing Google search with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, a major shift that has unleashed a new kind of bot loose on the web. To offer users a tidy AI summary instead of Google's "10 blue links," companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have started sending out bots to retrieve and recap content in real time. They are scraping webpages and loading relevant content into the AI's memory and "reading" far more content than a human ever would. According to data shared exclusively with The Washington Post, traffic from retrieval bots grew 49 percent in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024. The data is from TollBit, a New York-based start-up that helps news publishers monitor and make money when AI companies use their content. TollBit's report, based on data from 266 websites - half of which are run by national and local news organizations - suggests that the growth of bots that retrieve information when a user prompts an AI model is on an exponential curve. "It starts with publishers, but this is coming for everyone," Toshit Panigrahi, CEO and co-founder of TollBit, said in an interview. Panigrahi said that this kind of bot traffic, which can be hard for websites to detect, reflects growing demand for content, even as AI tools devastate traffic to news sites and other online platforms. "Human eyeballs to your site decreased. But the net amount of content access, we believe, fundamentally is going to explode," he said. A spokesperson for OpenAI said that referral traffic to publishers from ChatGPT searches may be lower in quantity but that it reflects a stronger user intent compared with casual web browsing. To capitalize on this shift, websites will need to reorient themselves to AI visitors rather than human ones, Panigrahi said. But he also acknowledged that squeezing payment for content when AI companies argue that scraping online data is fair use will be an uphill climb, especially as leading players make their newest AI visitors even harder to identify. Debate around the AI industry's use of online content has centered on the gargantuan amounts of text needed to train the AI models that power tools like ChatGPT. To obtain that data, tech companies use bots that scrape the open web for free, which has led to a raft of lawsuits alleging copyright theft from book authors and media companies, including a New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. Other news publishers have opted for licensing deals. (In April, The Washington Post inked a deal with OpenAI.) In the past eight months, as chatbots have evolved to incorporate features like web search and "reasoning" to answer more complex queries, traffic for retrieval bots has skyrocketed. It grew 2.5 times as fast as traffic for bots that scrape data for training between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to TollBit's report. Panigrahi said TollBit's data may underestimate the magnitude of this change because it doesn't reflect bots that AI companies send out on behalf of AI "agents" that can complete tasks on a user's behalf, like ordering takeout from DoorDash. The start-up's findings also add a new dimension to mounting evidence that the modern internet - optimized for Google search results and social media algorithms - will have to be restructured as the popularity of AI answers grows. "To think of it as, 'Well, I'm optimizing my search for humans' is missing out on a big opportunity," he said. Installing TollBit's analytics platform is free for news publishers, and the company has more than 2,000 clients, many of which are struggling with these seismic changes, according to data in the report. Although news publishers and other websites can implement blockers to prevent various AI bots from scraping their content, TollBit found that more than 26 million AI scrapes bypassed those blockers in March alone. Some AI companies claim bots for AI agents don't need to follow bot instructions because they are acting on behalf of a user. Mark Howard, chief operating officer for the media company Time, a TollBit client, said the start-up's traffic data has helped Time negotiate content licensing deals with AI companies including OpenAI and the search engine Perplexity. But the market to fairly compensate publishers is far from established, Howard said. "The vast majority of the AI bots out there absolutely are not sourcing the content through any kind of paid mechanism. ... There is a very, very long way to go."

AI Is Killing Google Search: Websites Lose Traffic, Ads, And Revenue As ChatGPT And Other AI Tools Reshape How We Find Information Online

As companies keep on advancing in the field of AI and pushing further in the application and widespread usage of the technology, we see a change or transition in the making of the entire internal economy, given how the old business models seem to slowly start fading, and websites that are more dependent on Google for their traffic seem to be struggling as companies with AI tools seem to be gaining more momentum. Now, a recent article sheds more light on the rise of AI and the changing dynamics of the internet. With the AI frenzy not going away any time soon, the tech community is noticing a major shift in how the internet works, potentially impacting millions of businesses and jobs. This is because previously, Google Search was relied on heavily by companies to bring traffic to their websites. Now, with tools such as ChatGPT or even Perplexity in the picture, many people have started relying on these platforms to get answers, reducing the need to click on links or go to websites. As Barron's article recently pointed out, Google Search is slowly starting to fade, as people have started using AI tools more frequently or even benefiting from summaries that are shown in Google directly, called the AI overviews, without clicking on any links. As a result, many websites that were heavily dependent on Google for traffic have lost visitors. This includes travel sites majorly, informative sites, and even news outlets. As a result of losing traffic, many companies are not making as much money and sometimes laying off jobs. The reason why this is vital is due to the potential change that might be underway where companies replace old business models and resort instead to more AI tools or even charge for content as AI is determined to become the new homepage of the internet. Google itself might not suffer since it is also investing heavily in AI tools, but the sites that depend on Google traffic seem to bear the brunt of this. With the internet evolving and people relying on AI tools and not pages for getting answers to their queries, companies need to act more promptly in order to adapt to the changing dynamics and either create their own AI tools, partner with existing AI companies or even look into ways to diversify their income. As the internet seems to be changing rapidly, so should the companies in order to remain agile.

News outlets in crisis mode as Google-led AI search push crushes...

Major news outlets are in crisis mode as artificial intelligence chatbots pushed by Google and other Big Tech giants crush website traffic. Google has rolled out an "AI Overviews" feature in its search engine that demotes traditional "blue links" to other sites in favor of auto-generated summaries. Last month, the search giant rolled out "AI Mode" - which is expected to make the problem even worse by respond to search queries with chatbot-style conversations and few direct links. Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of news outlet The Atlantic, told employees earlier this year that they should assume traffic from Google will drop toward zero over time, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. "Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine," Thompson told the Journal. "We have to develop new strategies." Dwindling traffic is hurting revenue for cash-strapped newsrooms and fueling layoffs. When Business Insider slashed 21% of its staff in a newsroom-wide culling last month, its top boss Barbara Peng said the move was meant to help "endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control." Traffic to Business Insider's website plunged by a whopping 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, according to data from analytics sites Similarweb cited by the Journal. HuffPost has also lost more than half of its traffic over the same period, the data showed, while the Washington Post - another newsroom racked by job cuts - has lost nearly half its search audience. The rollout of AI-generated summaries in place of links "is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated," Washington Post CEO William Lewis said. Google did not immediately return a request for comment. Despite the traffic losses, Google has claimed that it is still funneling traffic to news sites through search. Critics, such as the News Media Alliance - a trade group that represents hundreds of news outlets including The Post - has warned that AI Overviews and other Google-implemented AI features will have devastating consequences for the industry. They allege that Google and other AI giants have used news content to train their chatbots without proper credit or compensation - and then used those same products to erode traffic. Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of News Media Alliance, blasted Googles' rollout of AI Mode last month as "theft." "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue," Coffey said. "Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company." The AI push comes as Google faces intense pressure from the feds over its business model - including losses in a pair of antitrust cases brought by the DOJ that could force a breakup of the company. US District Judge Amit Mehta is set to decide by August on how to break up Google's illegal dominance over online search after labeling the company as a "monopolist" in an initial ruling last year. DOJ lawyers want Mehta to consider the future impact of AI when crafting remedies. Elsewhere, Google recently lost a separate DOJ case in which it was determined to have two illegal monopolies over digital advertising technology. In that case, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema touched on the impact to news outlets, finding that Google's "exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web." The remedy phase of the digital ad tech trial will begin in September.

Global publishers lose traffic to Google's new AI tools: Here's what it means

News outlets are suing or licensing content, while also investing in apps, newsletters, and events to engage readers directly. The rise of generative AI chatbots is hitting online news publishers. Heavily reliant on Google search for traffic, many media outlets are now facing steep declines as chatbots and AI-driven platforms are changing how search works. Instead of showing a list of links, these AI chatbots often give instant answers right at the top of the page. This means people no longer need to click on a news article to get the information. And for news websites, fewer clicks mean fewer readers -- and less money. According to data from Similarweb, traffic to HuffPost from Google searches has dropped by more than 50% over the last three years. Similarly, Business Insider lost 55% of its search traffic in the same period. The company even laid off 21% of its staff, citing "extreme traffic drops outside of our control." "This is a real danger to journalism," said William Lewis, CEO of The Washington Post, which is also seeing big traffic drops. The New York Times has witnessed search traffic fall from 44% to 36.5%. This shift started with Google's AI Overviews, which summarise answers at the top of the page. Its newer AI Mode, which was launched last month in the US, provides chatbot-style answers, often without even clicking on the link. Atlantic CEO Nicholas said, "Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine." Also read: Motorola Edge 50 Fusion price drops to under Rs 18,100 on Flipkart: How to get this deal News companies are now trying new ways to reach readers directly. Some are improving their apps, sending more email newsletters, and holding live events to build stronger relationships with audiences. Organisations like The New York Times have filed lawsuits for using their content without permission, while others like News Corp are opting for licensing their information to get paid when AI tools use their articles. Google says it still sends traffic to websites and shows links for essential news topics. However, with the changing dynamics of search engines, people are prioritising AI chatbots over these news websites.