Daily Mail says Google AI Overviews have killed click-throughs

That’s a sharp drop from the 56% lower clickthrough rate Steven cited in May 2025 at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Poland.

However, despite that “big, scary number,” this hasn’t been catastrophic for Daily Mail’s traffic, Steven said on stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe on Oct. 28. That’s because AI Overviews aren’t showing up for many keywords that Daily Mail “cares about,” she said.

AI Overviews don’t typically show up around breaking news stories, so by the time a keyword is triggering an AIO, “the story’s probably moved on,” Steven said. 

While Steven couldn’t recall the precise AI Overviews percentage impact on the Daily Mail’s traffic on stage, she said it’s a “very, very low single-digit” number. (Steven noted that Daily Mail is seeing AI Overviews appear for news queries, though it’s “a low percentage.”)

Elizabeth Reid, vp of search at Google, wrote in a May 2024 blog post that “we aim to not show AI Overviews for hard news topics, where freshness and factuality are important.”

This year, Daily Mail hasn’t seen a significant increase in the prevalence of AI Overviews for the keywords that it targets, Steven said. But ultimately, Daily Mail — like most publishers — is at the whim of Google. Google could turn on AI Overviews for more queries, and AI Mode could become the default search experience, Steven noted. Even referral traffic from Google Discover is volatile, and the Discover feeds are increasingly clogged up with YouTube videos and sponsored content, making it “harder and harder” to get a lot of traffic from there, she said.

But Daily Mail is in some ways insulated from the impact of AI Overviews, due to the majority of its readers coming directly to its site. Also, most of its organic search traffic comes from branded search (meaning people are googling “Daily Mail” attached to other search keywords), Steven said.

But other changes Google has made to the search experience are pushing publishers’ site links further down the page, such as showing more videos, forums and other modules to users. Even when ranking first on the Google search page around a breaking news story, Daily Mail isn’t getting the “hundreds of thousands of page views” it would have gotten in the past, Steven said. 

As these Google updates have rolled out over the years — and people increasingly search on other platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Reddit — Daily Mail has prioritized growing its direct traffic and business, according to Steven. The publisher launched a subscription product last year, and has a goal to get to 1 million subscribers in 2028.

Over 60% of Daily Mail’s traffic is direct (accounting for 75% of all page views), Steven said. Daily Mail’s U.K. site had 210 million desktop and mobile visits in October 2025, according to Similarweb data.

“AI Overviews has exacerbated an existing problem and challenge that we have, but it isn’t the root cause of all of our search challenges,” Steven said.

Over 60% of Daily Mail’s organic search traffic is branded search. “That makes us quite resilient to a lot of these changes,” she added.

Managing the decline of search traffic remains a core priority for most publishers, but more publishers are starting to quantify what Google AI Overviews means for their traffic. Last week, People Inc. revealed that Google search now accounts for 24% of its traffic and that AI Overviews has caused programmatic advertising to dip as a result. But the media giant has successfully diversified its strategy to ensure it’s not a victim to that change.

While Steven was confident that Daily Mail could offset some of the declines in Google search traffic by building its direct traffic, she said she was closely monitoring any help regulators can give publishers. Specifically, she is watching to see if any remedies come from U.K. regulator the Competition and Markets Authority, which is investigating Google for how it uses and ranks publishers’ content in search. Daily Mail has advocated for more transparency, attribution and an improved value exchange between Google and publishers, Steven said.

Daily Mail’s SEO team isn’t trying to optimize for AI tools and platforms, either. Steven said she was skeptical of strategies like GEO.

“I think it’s a bit distracting… This is not like the olden days, where we can get lots of traffic from people clicking on links. We know that doesn’t happen. We need to start thinking about those as visibility opportunities, rather than traffic-driving opportunities,” she said. “People aren’t going to click on the links. It’s never going to be a replacement for the 10 blue links in Google that we had for such a long time.”