The Wall Street Journal reported in a June 11 news release thatGoogle's AI Overview tool and other AI-powered tools, including chatbots, are hitting news publishers' traffic hard. With the ability to access answers directly through chatbots, which are sometimes pulled from news content without publishers' permission, users no longer need to click on blue links in Google search results. This has led to a significant drop in traffic to news sites, cutting off the traffic support publishers need to maintain quality journalism.
Google launched the AI Overviews tool, a search results summary feature, last year, 1AI has learned. According to the Wall Street Journal, the launch of the tool negatively impacted traffic to sites such as travel guides, health tips and product reviews. And traffic is expected to be hit even harder by Google's AI model (which competes with ChatGPT), which answers questions in a conversational format and links to external sites less frequently.
In the case of The New York Times, for example, the share of traffic from natural search to its desktop and mobile sites dropped to 36.51 TP3T in April 2025, compared to 441 TP3T three years earlier, according to data provided by Similarweb.
However, Google gave a different account at its developer conference in May. The company claimed that its AI Overview feature actually boosted search traffic, although that claim may not apply to publishers.
In the face of this threat, publishers are actively seeking a response. Publishers such as The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Post are calling for a rapid shift in business models across the industry. Some publishers have entered into content-sharing agreements with AI companies for additional revenue streams. The New York Times recently signed a deal with Amazon to license its content for use in training Amazon's AI platform. Additionally, a number of publishers, including The Atlantic Monthly, have also partnered with OpenAI. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, on the other hand, plans to share advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot displays news content based on user queries.