"The firm's analysis of traffic metrics from 2,756 news sites around the world, 797 in the US, shows a painfully steep drop in Google search traffic over the last year: 33% worldwide and 38% in the US. Much of that drop, especially outside the US, happened after Google began rolling out AI Overview search results that provide a software-generated, multi-paragraph answer, in which you often have to click additional times to see links to the sources Google drew on for that reply."
"In the Reuters Institute report, senior research associate Nic Newman wrote that "it is not clear how much of this is down to AI overviews," and observed that not all news sites might suffer the same drop. The chart for US traffic shows it increasing over several months after the debut of Google's AI search results. "Queries around 'hard news' subjects in Google have been largely exempted from overviews, perhaps because of so-called hallucinations," he wrote."
Analysis of Chartbeat traffic metrics from 2,756 news sites globally, including 797 in the US, shows a 33% worldwide and 38% US decline in Google search referrals over the last year. Much of the decline outside the US coincided with rollout of Google's AI Overview results that deliver multi-paragraph, software-generated answers and often require extra clicks to reach source links. The drop is substantially larger than an earlier 10% estimate from Digital Context Next. Impacts vary by topic: hard news queries appear largely exempt from AI overviews, while lifestyle and utility content like weather, TV guides, and horoscopes are more affected. Google disputes the findings and notes missing Google News click-through data.
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