Hear from execs at The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Trusted Media Brands and many others
Google AI Overviews linked to 25% drop in publisher referral traffic, new data shows
As a Digiday+ member, you were able to access this article early through the Digiday+ Story Preview email. See other exclusives or manage your account.This article was provided as an exclusive preview for Digiday+ members, who were able to access it early. Check out the other features included with Digiday+ to help you stay ahead
Publishers are well-accustomed to Google’s familiar PR playbook — offering placating promises of more traffic and better-quality clicks to defuse backlash whenever it rolls out major search changes, even as the numbers often tell a different story. With Google AI Overviews, it’s no different.
Google has sought to quell publisher fears over the impact of AI Overviews on their search traffic in the last few weeks, with Liz Reid, vp and head of Google Search, writing an extensive blog post stating that third-party efforts to measure the impact of AI overviews on referral traffic “inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic.”
But publishers have seen this movie before. New publisher data reinforces the more familiar pattern: search referral traffic is declining year over year.
Digital Content Next (DCN), which counts the New York Times, Condé Nast and Vox among its approximately 40 member companies, checked in with 19 of them between May and June to see what was happening to their Google search referral traffic. The upshot: Google AI Overviews is indeed harming publisher traffic.
Organic search referral traffic from Google is declining broadly, with the majority of DCN member sites — spanning both news and entertainment — experiencing traffic losses from Google search between 1% and 25%. Twelve of the respondent companies were news brands, and seven were non-news.
Over eight weeks in May and June 2025, the median Google Search referral was down almost every week, with losses outpacing gains two-to-one. For the seven non-news brands in the survey, the downward slope was steady and unbroken.
Across the eight weeks, the median YoY decline in referred traffic from Google Search was -10% overall, -7% for news brands, and -14% for non-news brands, per the results.
Jason Kint, CEO of DCN, stressed that these losses are a direct consequence of Google AI Overviews, as many publishers claimed in their responses. The latest data offers a “ground truth” of what’s actually happening, cutting through Google’s vague claims about “quality clicks,” made in its latest post, he added. “I think all publishers are ignoring Google’s post. But this probably helps ground that,” added Kint.
The findings come shortly after a recent Pew survey of 900 U.S. consumers found that AI summaries are making users less likely to click through to links.
Hope in the form of Department of Justice remedies
There is some hope on the horizon, in the form of a pending remedies order from Judge Amit Mehta in the Department of Justice’s Google Search antitrust case. Baked into the numerous proposals being waded through is one core one, which, if it were to be granted, would be big news for publishers: the proposed separation of Google’s AI bot crawler from its search crawler, said Kint.
Currently, publishers can’t block Google’s AI crawler without disappearing off the search index entirely, so unless a DOJ mandate comes through forcing Google to change this, publishers are somewhat stuck in a holding pattern.
The judge could issue an injunction requiring immediate action rather than waiting for an appeal, stressed Kint. Typically, the DoJ would need to show that irreparable harm is occurring and that it’s likely to succeed on appeal. “Traffic is down double digits with some publishers, so that harm is happening in real time.” A ruling could force Google to provide the choice and separate the services right away, which would be a significant move, he added.
European publishers are also pushing for EU regulators to take swift action on the same issue with Google AI Overviews, claiming the that AI Overviews is having a detrimental effect on independent publishers’ sites, and that the inability to opt out of Google’s AI crawler without dropping off search rankings is causing irreparable harm. Google still maintains that many of the claims made about traffic from search are “highly incomplete.” A spokesperson for Google didn’t immediately return a request for comment on this story.
Preventative strategies
Publishers have a long history of adapting to Google’s changes, learning to navigate algorithm shifts, product updates, and new features while finding ways to maintain traffic and revenue.
Many have long argued that staying on top of breaking news and maintaining high-quality journalism is key to performing well on AI-driven platforms. SEO practices still matter, and five publishing execs recently told Digiday they’re not falling for hype around GEO and jumping to switch up their techniques. Others are being more proactive with adapting their SEO strategies.
Jess Sholtz, marketing consultant and former CMO for Ringer Media, a Swiss-headquartered media group, where she led AI strategy, agrees that core SEO strategy shouldn’t change. “[AI summary platforms like] ChatGPT are not building up a large index, it is RAG-ing on existing indexes,” she said “If you’re not in the [search engine] index you can’t be in the [AI summary] citation and you fail at that first point.”
RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and is a way of combining traditional search with AI text generation. Instead of the AI trying to memorize all information in its model, it retrieves relevant data from an external source or “index” and then generates an answer based on that retrieved information.
Sholtz is adamant that all publishers can ensure they’re ahead of potential future traffic knocks but that smaller, less well-known titles mustn’t neglect the importance of investing in their branding.
In the past, ranking at the top of Google search provided a kind of built-in credibility, even if the user didn’t know the publisher, she stressed. But with AI-driven interfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, that automatic trust has eroded. Without clear brand signals, even quality content struggles to generate clicks and engagement, shifting the focus from pure editorial strength to a combination of content, brand recognition, and user trust, added Sholz.
“On these new AI surfaces, being the top citation doesn’t have that same ‘oh it’s ranking so I trust it — it’s fine,’ factor,” she said. “And so branding is that first pillar that’s coming in a lot more because someone isn’t going to blindly just click that top citation.”
Over the last two years, Sholz helped lead a strategic change across Ringier Media, which focused on applying new resources to branding and tech to help assist with these challenges among its lesser-known titles, she added, though she wasn’t able to go into further detail without sign off from the media group.
More in Media
Media Briefing: Amazon’s off-site ad push is becoming publishers’ post-cookie playbook
Amazon is fast becoming a partner du jour for publishers: a kind of post-cookie data wingman that’s helping them monetize the approximate 70 percent of the open web that’s now unaddressable.
Despite the hype, publishers aren’t prioritizing GEO
Even though referral traffic is drying up, most publishers are skeptical of the hype around generative search optimization.
YouTube’s deliberate pace on scalable creator ads raises eyebrows among marketers
Scalable YouTube creator ads are a growing desire for marketers, but YouTube is reluctant to grow this part of its business too quickly.