AI Overviews: A “Devastating” Threat to Online News Audiences

Online news publishers are facing a significant challenge as AI-generated summaries in search results are causing a dramatic decline in audience traffic. A new study reveals that websites previously ranking at the top of search results could experience a staggering 79% drop in traffic if their content appears below Google’s AI Overviews.
AI Overviews, which provide a block of summarized text directly in search results, allow users to find the information they need without clicking through to the original source. This pushes organic search links further down the page, significantly reducing their visibility and the likelihood of users clicking on them.
The analysis by Authoritas found that a site holding the top search position could lose nearly 80% of its traffic when an AI overview is present. The study also highlighted that links to YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, appeared more prominently compared to standard search results. This research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK’s competition watchdog regarding the impact of Google AI Overviews.
While a Google spokesperson has dismissed the study as “inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions,” they acknowledge that “people are gravitating to AI-powered experiences.” They maintain that AI features create “new opportunities for websites to be discovered” and that they “continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day.”
However, another study, a month-long survey of nearly 69,000 Google searches by the Pew Research Center, indicated that users only clicked a link under an AI summary once every 100 times. Senior news executives have also expressed frustration, stating that Google has repeatedly refused to share data on the impact of AI summaries.
UK publishers are already feeling the effects. Carly Steven, an executive at MailOnline, reported a significant drop in clicks from search results featuring an AI summary in May, with clickthrough rates falling by 56.1% on desktop and 48.2% on mobile.
A legal complaint has been filed with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, a collaborative effort by the tech justice group Foxglove, the Independent Publishers Alliance, and the Movement for an Open Web. Owen Meredith, chief executive of the News Media Association, accused Google of attempting to keep users within “its own walled garden, taking and monetizing valuable content.” He warned that the current situation is “entirely unsustainable and will ultimately result in the death of quality information online.”
Rosa Curling, director of Foxglove, emphasized the “devastating impact that Google’s ‘AI overviews’ are already having on the UK’s independent news industry.” She argued that not only is Google “stealing journalists’ work and passing it off as their own,” but they are also using this content to “fuel their own tools and profits, while making it harder for media outlets to reach the readers they rely on to sustain their work.”