Traffic Apocalypse - Columbia Journalism Review
Worldwide search traffic has fallen by 15 percent in the past year, estimates Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform. The culprit: AI search. Now that AI-generated summaries are being integrated into search results, anyone looking for information has less reason to click through to the websites where that information originates. For media publishers whose business models rely on referral traffic to bring them advertising revenue, this shift feels nothing short of catastrophic.
There’s no getting around the decline in traffic. Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing not only that people who see an AI-generated summary on Google search are significantly less likely to click on external links than users who don’t, but that people almost never click on the links included in the AI summary. (They do so just 1 percent of the time.) Similarweb reported that, in the year after the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, in May 2024, the proportion of news searches in Google where people didn’t click on a single link rose from 56 percent to nearly 69.
Earlier this month, the Independent Publishers Alliance submitted an antitrust complaint against Google to the European Commission, alleging that AI Overviews “have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss.” They pointed out that most publishers cannot opt out of having their content ingested for AI Overviews because that would mean exclusion from Google search.
