The latest move by Google to enhance AI search has accelerated the arrival of the search traffic apocalypse for publishers, according to industry insiders.
The giant digital platform's move to AI summaries at the top of search has created widespread fear of a further drop in referral traffic for news publishers.
Searchers get the summary and need to hunt further for links.
And Google this month announced Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the US.
“As we’ve rolled out AI Overviews, we’ve heard from power users that they want AI responses for even more of their searches. So today, we’re introducing an early experiment in Labs: AI Mode,” said Google in a blog post.
“This new Search mode expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions.
“You can ask anything on your mind and get a helpful AI-powered response with the ability to go further with follow-up questions and helpful web links.”
Publishers have seen traffic falling for a while now and it’s not just Google. Long gone are the days when a publisher could count on a good flow of audience from posting on Facebook.
“It’s a long-standing yet seldom-discussed reality that many publishers have quietly been grappling with declining traffic behind the scenes for several years,” according to publisher Scott Purcell, co-founder, Man of Many.
“Now, with the accelerating impact of AI, this anxiety has intensified - and rightly so. It’s an issue few are comfortable acknowledging publicly, wary of the risk it might pose to their partnerships, advertising revenue or future bookings.”
Purcell points to the start of 2025 and job cuts across major publishers, including the Washington Post, Vox Media and HuffPost, following job losses last year at Pedestrian TV, Nine and News Corp.
Research by Bain & Company found 80% of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by 15% to 25%.
Google’s AI-generated summaries were introduced in Australia in September.
The summary provides answers, not links, to queries, which could mean a sharp fall in referrals via links to news articles from Google search.
“As Google's Gemini-driven AI grows in capability and precision, it increasingly provides comprehensive answers directly on the search results page, which severely limits the incentive for users to click through,” said Scott Purcell at Man of Many who has just penned a deep dive into the issue.
“This phenomenon, known as 'zero-click' search, occurs when users obtain the information they need entirely within Google's search interface, bypassing publishers' websites entirely.”
In response, Maurice Blackburn is conducting a class action against Google for alleged anti-competitive conduct in the display digital advertising market in Australia, where it provides AdTech services to both advertisers and publishers of ads, and has a dominant position at all points of the AdTech supply chain.
Galloway sees the small publishers suffering more than the big players.
“Another troubling development is the shift towards exclusive licensing agreements. Both Google and OpenAI are negotiating direct content licensing deals with larger publishers, offering compensation for training their AI models,” he said.
“This approach, however, leaves smaller, independent publishers excluded, increasing their economic vulnerability.
“Such exclusive partnerships create an uneven playing field, giving larger publishers preferential treatment and exacerbating existing financial disparities within the publishing industry. Publishers who are not part of these deals face heightened uncertainty, decreased visibility, and ongoing volatility.”
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