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The growing popularity of AI-powered search features is already upending a two-decade-long symbiotic relationship between Google Search and web publishers.
Historically, publishers create content, Google crawls it, displays it in search queries and runs ads off the back of it, sending traffic to publishers’ sites, which then display ads against it.
But recently, data shows that equation is increasingly lacking in one variable,: Google isn’t sending as much referral traffic as before.
Instead, four words – Google’s “AI Overviews” and “AI Mode” – represent a shift that is raising two existential questions for publishers.
How will they drive traffic in this new AI era of search? And how can they keep monetizing their content, which makes the open internet an effective, engaging environment for advertisers?
Traffic to the world’s 500 most visited publishers has dropped 27% year on year since February last year, an average of 64 million visits per month, according to data collated by Similarweb and shared with The Current.
This is a staggering decline considering AI chatbots have only delivered an increase of 5.5 million referrals per month in the same time frame.
Similarweb’s data found that despite some news sites increasing their referral traffic in February 2025 compared to a year prior, big hitters like The New York Times (-4.81%), The Guardian (-3.28%) and CNBC (-20.92%) saw significant year-on-year losses.
This data is corroborated by a recent report from Enders Analysis, which found that half of all publishers have seen a decline in search traffic over the past year. The report said AI overviews were “cannibalizing website visits.”
Google’s AI Overview generates top-of-page responses to search queries, designed to reduce the user’s need to search across multiple results, while its AI Mode enables a chat-based interaction for exploring topics.
While these AI search features include referral links, “zero-click searches,” where users don’t click on any search results, are on the rise.
Indeed, the rollouts of Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode over the past year have left some publishers feeling “betrayed” and hit by dwindling referral traffic.
One unnamed former senior executive told Bloomberg that supporting publishers was “incidental” to Google’s larger aims. “Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil,” the former senior executive said. “The main thing they’re trying to do is get people to consume Google services.”
To be sure, the growth in usage of AI chatbots from the likes of Perplexity, Anthropic and ChatGPT is also likely contributing to the decline in search referrals.
Still, ChatGPT’s 37.5 million search-like queries per day are a drop in the ocean to Google’s 14 billion daily searches.
Google’s influence in driving traffic to publishers means that small tweaks can have outsized effects.
How can publishers adjust to this upheaval? Eric Hoover, SEO director at Jellyfish, says publishers will need to format their output to become more friendly to AI search.
The solution? “Answer engine optimization,” he says.
“Curating pages and content that speaks directly to what users are asking and what types of results are appearing across AI, discussion forums and search elements like ‘people also ask’ or ‘things to know’ results will help gain AI results.”
James Barber, head of SEO strategy at the media agency Go Up, points out that Google’s AI rewards varied insights.
“Publishers need to focus on exclusive, original, high-effort content,” he says. “Interviews, investigations, proprietary data, anything that AI can’t easily replicate or rewrite. Offering unique content increases the chances of your site being recognized as a valuable source.”
Hoover also suggests KPIs will need to be adjusted. Rather than focus on traditional metrics such as rank position or traffic, publishers will have to track AI citation position, zero-click results that feature their content and AI-powered referrals, as well as more traditional UX metrics such as time on site.
However, adapting to this new SEO paradigm could again expose publishers to changing algorithms and will do little to assuage fears of losing traffic and potential revenue.
Charlotte Tobitt, editor of Press Gazette, says that news organizations are instead looking to brand building to entice readers without the need for referrals.
She says even traditionally ad-funded sites like Mail Online and The Sun, which leaned heavily into SEO-led content to build their respective readerships and entice advertisers, are pivoting toward partial paywalls to protect their revenues.
Stronger relationships with advertisers and audiences, driving direct visits, helped U.S. publishing giant Dotdash Meredith achieve revenue growth in Q1 this year, a rare feat for publishers today.
CEO Neil Vogel said on an earnings call that just over a third of the publisher’s traffic came from Google Search, compared to around 60% in 2021.
“A recurring theme has been the need to grow direct audiences, that is, people that know the brand and deliberately come to a website homepage or app rather than those stumbling across it through an information query in search or through a social post,” Tobitt says.
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