Publishers and editors fear a steep fall in referral traffic, a potential killer of a significant portion of audiences for news, as AI changes the nature of search engines.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has released its Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025 report based on a survey of 326, including 65 editors-in-chief, 63 CEOs or managing directors and 53 heads of digital or innovation.
“Changes to search, in particular, will become a major grievance for a news industry that has already lost social traffic and fears a further decline in visibility as AI interfaces start to generate ‘story like’ answers to news queries,” the report said.
Almost three-quarters (74%) of survey respondents are worried about a potential decline in referral traffic from search engines this year.
Data sourced from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search remains stable for now but publishers fear the extension of AI-generated summaries to important news stories.
This comes after big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.
Google argues that links within AI overviews deliver more click-throughs than in a traditional web listing, though there may be fewer links visible overall.
Publishers will be putting more effort this year into building relationships with AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, both of which have been courting high-quality content in return for citations and/or money.
With consumer attention switching to video, more publisher effort is also being planned for YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
The report says audience-facing uses of AI are likely to proliferate in 2025 with publishers leaning into format personalisation as a way of increasing engagement.
The majority of those surveyed said they would be actively exploring features that turn text articles into audio (75%), provide AI summaries at the top of stories (70%), or translate news articles into different languages (65%).
More than half (56%) of respondents said they would be looking into AI chatbots and search interfaces. Not all these experiments will make it into full production but the direction of travel is clear.
Many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about the year ahead – if not about journalism itself.
“Uncertain times tend to be good for business and the prospect of ‘Trump unleashed could lead to a surge in web traffic and even in subscriptions. But this is by no means guaranteed.
“One key challenge will be to re-engage audiences that have fallen out of the habit of consuming news over recent years and to find ways of attracting the next generation.
“Many publishers will be looking to dramatically upscale the quality of their own websites, create more personalised news experiences, and invest further in audio and video.
“With consumer expectations moving at a rapid pace, embracing change while staying true to core journalistic values will be the key balancing trick for the year ahead.”
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