Google's AI Search Cut Publisher Traffic by Up to 89 Percent

DMG Media, the owner of the Daily Mail and Metro, told the UK's Competition and Markets Authority that click-through rates from Google dropped by up to 89 percent between June and July 2025, citing impacts from AI Overviews. That figure is the sharpest quantified damage yet in a publishing downturn that followed Google's rollout of AI-generated search results — and it sits in stark contrast to Google's own account of a healthy web.

How did Google and publishers end up here?

For years, the relationship between Google and digital publishers was largely reciprocal. Outlets spent time and money on search engine optimization (the practice of tuning webpages to rank at the top of Google's results), while Google filled its search index with their content and sent them exposure and traffic in return.

That arrangement broke in 2024. Google rolled out AI Overviews, a feature that places an AI-generated summary of pages from across the web at the very top of Search, with links to sources placed below the summary. Publishers stopped competing for first-page clicks and became dependent on an AI system that regurgitates their content, with no guarantee users will click through to the source.

The industry warned immediately. The News/Media Alliance, a publisher trade group, said the feature would be "catastrophic" to web traffic. A 2024 investigation by the Press Gazette found AI Overviews appeared for almost a quarter of news-related searches in May 2024. By August, the outlet found the summaries had begun replacing media sites that previously held the top spots for certain queries.

The trajectory sharpened in May 2025, when Google launched AI Mode, a feature that replaces the standard search engine with a chatbot-like interface providing detailed summaries drawn from results on the web. A future where Google stops sending traffic to outside sites at all moved measurably closer.

Takeaway: in under two years, Google went from sending publishers readers to summarizing publishers' work on its own page.

What do the traffic numbers actually show?

The News/Media Alliance's warning tracked with results. A June 2025 report from The Wall Street Journal showed traffic to Business Insider, The Washington Post, HuffPost, and the WSJ itself has declined since 2022.

Data from the analytics company Similarweb, cited by the WSJ, suggested search traffic to The New York Times sank from 44 percent to 35.5 percent of its traffic in three years. Digiday reported similar dips among members of Digital Content Next (DCN), a trade association representing Bloomberg, The Associated Press, The New York Times, Condé Nast, and Vox Media: between May and June 2025, DCN says 19 of its members lost Google traffic, ranging from 1 to 25 percent.

Pew Research added a behavioral data point: people are "less likely" to click on links to other websites when they see an AI Overview. That is the mechanism behind every percentage drop above — the summary satisfies the query, and the click never happens.

Google disputes the framing. Google Search head Liz Reid said last year that click volume from the search engine remained "relatively stable," adding that AI search sends more clicks to different types of websites, especially those "with forums, videos, podcasts, and posts" from other users. Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president of knowledge and information, told the BBC: "From our point of view, the web is thriving." Note what that claim does not address: whether news publishers specifically are thriving. Fox's phrasing is a point of view, not a measurement he discloses.

Takeaway: publishers have multi-outlet, multi-source evidence of decline; Google's rebuttal rests on aggregate stability and a shift toward user-generated content.

Have publishers fought back in court?

Publishers worldwide have filed lawsuits claiming Google's AI search features damaged their traffic. The record so far favors Google. US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed an antitrust case from Chegg and Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Verge. Mehta also rejected a proposed class action surrounding AI Overviews filed by Arkansas newspapers.

Regulatory scrutiny continues alongside the litigation, though the source reports no ruling has forced a fundamental change to the features themselves.

Takeaway: legal remedies have largely failed, leaving publishers to adapt or negotiate.

What are publishers and Google doing now?

Publishers are adjusting strategy. Many now lean on social media, newsletters, and subscriptions to promote and monetize their work. Others use a toggle Google broadly rolled out after an order from the UK that lets sites opt out of appearing in AI Mode and AI Overviews without affecting standard search visibility. That opt-out protects content from being summarized, but it does not restore lost traffic.

Google has made partial concessions. It has made sources more prominent in both AI features: hovering over a link now shows a pop-up listing articles with accompanying images, and another change places in-line links "higher up in responses more frequently." Google will likely keep adjusting how it presents sources while developing ways to compensate publishers whose content informs its results.

Compensation is the more consequential track. Google says 400 publishers — including The Washington Post, CNN, Axios, and the Financial Times — are now part of its News AI pilot program, which licenses content to develop new AI features. Reports from The Information and Digiday say Google is also testing a program that pays publishers for the use of their content in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google has not disclosed payment terms or scale, and whether the program can repair the relationship remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the pressure on links continues. Google has started automatically expanding AI Overviews for some queries, burying blue links further, rather than requiring users to click a "Show more" button. The WSJ reports Reddit is considering cutting off Google entirely over dropping traffic. And Common Sense Media, a nonprofit, claims the summaries pose an "unacceptable" risk to kids by failing to respond appropriately to children in crisis.

Takeaway: concessions on source visibility are real but cosmetic; the open question is whether licensing money can replace the click economy Google dismantled.