How Google’s AI search turned online publishing upside down

Digital publishing leaned on Google for a very long time. Outlets poured time and money into optimizing their pages to rank at the top, hoping to turn a search result into a click. The relationship was reciprocal: publishers filled out Google’s index, and Google sent them exposure and traffic.

How it started

AI search broke that balance. In 2024 Google launched AI Overviews — a machine-generated summary of pages from across the web, placed at the very top of results, with source links tucked below. Instead of competing for a click on the first page, publishers became beholden to a system that regurgitates their work with no guarantee anyone reaches the original. The News/Media Alliance called the fallout “catastrophic.” A Press Gazette investigation found Overviews appeared in nearly a quarter of news searches by May 2024, and by August were displacing media sites from their former top spots. In May 2025 Google added AI Mode, a chatbot-like interface that replaces conventional search.

How it’s going

The fears were well founded. The Wall Street Journal documented declining search traffic at Business Insider, The Washington Post, HuffPost, and the WSJ itself. Similarweb data suggested The New York Times’ search traffic share fell from 44% to 35.5% over three years. Nineteen members of the Digital Content Next trade group lost 1 to 25% of their Google traffic between May and June 2025. DMG Media (Daily Mail, Metro) told UK regulators click-through rates dropped by up to 89% over June–July. Pew Research confirmed that people are less likely to follow links once they see an AI Overview.

Google disagrees. Search chief Liz Reid said click volume stayed “relatively stable,” while vice president Nick Fox told the BBC, “From our point of view, the web is thriving.” Publishers worldwide have sued, with little success: Judge Amit Mehta dismissed an antitrust case from Chegg and Penske Media (owner of The Verge) and rejected a class action from Arkansas newspapers.

What happens next

Publishers are pivoting to social media, newsletters, and subscriptions. Some use a toggle to opt out of AI Mode and AI Overviews without losing ordinary search visibility — an option Google rolled out after a UK order. Under pressure, the company has made sources more prominent and now places in-line links higher in responses more often. Its News AI pilot now includes 400 publishers, among them The Washington Post, CNN, Axios, and the Financial Times, and it is testing payments for content used in AI results.

Meanwhile, Google has begun auto-expanding summaries for some queries, pushing the blue links even further down. Reddit, per the WSJ, is reportedly weighing whether to cut Google off. And the nonprofit Common Sense Media warns that AI Overviews pose an “unacceptable” risk to children by mishandling queries from kids in crisis.

Source: The Verge