Google’s AI search changes upended online publishing

For most of the web's history, the arrangement was simple. Publishers filled Google's index with reporting and explainers, and Google sent readers back to them. That trade paid for a lot of journalism. Google's AI search features, starting with AI Overviews in 2024 and AI Mode in May 2025, have pulled that arrangement apart by answering the question at the top of the page and leaving the click optional.

The numbers publishers and researchers have put on the record are hard to wave away. DMG Media told the UK's Competition and Markets Authority that click-through rates fell by up to 89 percent between June and July 2025, citing AI Overviews. Digital Content Next said 19 of its members saw Google traffic losses of 1 to 25 percent over a single month in 2025. Pew found people are less likely to click through to other sites when an AI Overview appears. Google's position is that clicks are "relatively stable" and the web is thriving. Both things can't be fully true for the same publishers.

We'll say up front that AI summaries in search are genuinely useful. A quick, synthesized answer to a plain question is a better experience for a lot of queries, and pretending otherwise isn't honest. The problem isn't that the answer box exists. The problem is that the answer box is built out of other people's work, and the system that once paid them back in traffic is quietly being retired without a replacement anyone has agreed to.

That's the part I'm watching most closely. Google is still the front door for much of the web, and it's now deciding not just which sources rank, but whether a reader ever needs to visit one. When one company controls both the summary and the link beneath it, every design choice becomes an economic decision for thousands of newsrooms. The latest example is small but telling: some AI Overviews now expand automatically instead of waiting for a click on "Show more," pushing the blue links further down.

Google has made some real concessions. Sources are more visible on hover, inline links appear higher in responses more often, and publishers can now opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode without disappearing from regular search, an option Google rolled out broadly after a UK order. Those are worth having. But opting out doesn't bring traffic back. It just means a publisher stops contributing to the thing that replaced its traffic.

The money question is where this gets decided. Google says 400 publishers, including The Washington Post, CNN, Axios and the Financial Times, are in its News AI pilot, which licenses content for new AI features, and reports say it's testing payments for content used in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Our worry is what that looks like at scale: a licensing tier for big names with leverage, and nothing for the small and local outlets whose work fills the same summaries. That's not a healthy web. That's a web with a few landlords and a lot of unpaid tenants.

The courts haven't offered much relief so far. Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the antitrust case from Chegg and Penske Media and rejected a proposed class action from Arkansas newspapers. So for now, the terms are being set by product decisions and regulators, especially in the UK, rather than by law.

Our read: AI search is here to stay, and it should be. But if the systems that summarize the web stop sustaining the people who write it, the summaries will get worse over time, because there will be less original reporting to summarize. Google has every incentive to fix that before the well runs dry. We'd like to see it act like it believes that.

AI Overviews launched in 2024, placing an AI-written summary above traditional results with links to selected sources; Press Gazette found it on almost a quarter of news-related searches by May 2024. AI Mode, launched in May 2025, replaces the results page with a chatbot-style interface. Publishers have leaned harder on newsletters, social platforms and subscriptions, and the Wall Street Journal reports Reddit is considering cutting off Google over falling traffic.