NEW YORK – A tectonic shift is underway in the digital world, and it is creating an extinction-level event for the online publishing industry. Google, the undisputed gatekeeper of the internet, has begun rolling out its new “AI Overview” feature—a direct-answer summary that appears at the top of search results. While designed to compete with tools like ChatGPT, this move is proving to be a devastating blow to the publishers who create the very content that fuels the AI, triggering a catastrophic collapse in web traffic and threatening the 20-year-old business model that has sustained the open internet.
This is the second, and potentially final, blow in a one-two punch that has left the media industry reeling. After a series of algorithm changes last year that had already sent search engine traffic plummeting for news websites—even forcing some independent publishers into bankruptcy—the AI Overviews are now siphoning off the remaining clicks. The result is a crisis of unprecedented scale, with major news organizations laying off staff, traffic to popular websites cut in half, and a growing sense that the symbiotic relationship between Google and content creators has been irrevocably broken.
The Carnage: A Digital Bloodbath
The data paints a grim picture of the damage already inflicted. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, traffic from organic search to the desktop and mobile sites of major publishers like HuffPost and The Washington Post has been more than halved in the last three years. Even the venerable New York Times saw its share of traffic from organic search fall to just 36.5% as of April 2025.
The consequences have been swift and brutal. In May, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng laid off approximately 21% of her staff, citing “extreme traffic declines beyond our control” as the primary reason. The sentiment is one of grim resignation among industry leaders.
“Google is changing from a search engine to an answer engine,” Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, said in an interview, predicting that traffic from Google will eventually drop towards zero. Like other media executives, he is now scrambling to develop new strategies, focusing on building direct relationships with readers in a world where the firehose of Google traffic can no longer be relied upon.
The Mechanism of the “Great Un-Clicking”
The problem is simple and profound: the AI Overview feature is working too well. By providing a concise, AI-generated summary at the very top of the page, Google is giving users the answer they are looking for without requiring them to click on any of the traditional blue links below.
While Google executives argue that the company is still committed to sending valuable traffic to the web, a new study by the Pew Research Centre reveals a starkly different reality. The study found that only a tiny fraction of users—just 8% of the 900 Google users surveyed—actually click on a source page after reading an AI Overview summary. The vast majority are content with the short information provided by the AI.
Worse still for news publishers, the sources that are cited in these summaries are often not original reporting. The Pew study found that the most frequently cited sources in both AI summaries and traditional search results are Wikipedia, YouTube (a Google subsidiary), and Reddit. News sites are referred to in both AI summaries and traditional results only about 5% of the time.
In one particularly alarming case, the tech news site 404 Media discovered that its original story about AI-assisted music production was not showing up in Google searches because the AI Overview had summarized the content of the story but failed to provide a link to it. As the site concluded, “The AI Overview ensures that information is presented in such a way that the source itself is never clicked on.”
The Vicious Cycle: SEO’s Demise and AI’s Unreliability
The impact on the multi-billion dollar industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been equally devastating. For years, the goal was to rank on the first page of Google. Now, even the top-ranked site is seeing its click-through rate fall by an average of 34.5% in searches that include an AI summary, according to The Register. Being number one is no longer a guarantee of traffic.
Beyond the business implications, there is another, more insidious risk: the unreliability of the AI itself. The investigation by 404 Media also revealed that one of the responses given by the AI Overview was actually generated from another AI summary, which in turn was based on an AI source. As information moves further away from its original human source, the margin for error increases exponentially. Experts describe this as “the vicious circle of information that leads to the collapse of artificial intelligence models themselves.” Without a steady stream of new, high-quality human-generated information to learn from, the AI models risk becoming an echo chamber of increasingly inaccurate and superficial content.
Google’s Winning Hand: The New Advertising Model
While the digital publishing world is in crisis, Google’s business is booming. The company’s parent, Alphabet, saw its revenues increase to a record $96.4 billion in the last quarter of 2024, with the bulk of that—$54.2 billion—coming from advertising.
The reason is simple: Google has changed the game to ensure it always wins. The company is now placing advertisements directly in and around the AI Overview summaries. It no longer needs to send a user to a publisher’s website to monetize their query; it can now capture that advertising revenue at the very top of the search results page.
The numbers are telling. According to a study by SparkToro, by 2024, only 360 out of every 1,000 Google searches in the U.S. led to a site that was not either owned or advertised by Google. With the rise of AI summaries, that number is predicted to get even worse.
A Desperate Monopoly?
While Google still dominates the market with around 90% of all searches, the rise of rival AI-powered search engines like Perplexity has clearly put the tech giant on the defensive. According to one Bank of America executive, Google’s spending of $14 billion on infrastructure in a single quarter points not to growing demand, but to “desperation in the face of competition.”
This all comes as the U.S. Department of Justice is actively pursuing a landmark antitrust case against the company, accusing it of being a monopoly and even demanding that it divest its Chrome browser. The company’s recent moves with AI and advertising are likely to add fuel to that fire, painting a picture of a dominant company that is willing to sacrifice the health of the entire online ecosystem to protect its own market position.
For now, the internet is at a crossroads. The business model that funded two decades of online content creation is being systematically dismantled. In its place is a new, more centralized system where Google provides the answers and reaps the rewards, leaving publishers to wonder if they have any future at all in the new age of AI.
