Publishers are terrified of an AI search apocalypse. They should be.
Traffic from search may be riding a small wave, but there's an AI tsunami on the horizon.
January is all about predictions, so here's an easy one: AI search is going to blow up in 2025. ChatGPT Search and Perplexity are poised for a big year, and it’s becoming a trendy thing among those in the know to switch your browser's default search engine to one of them. Even Bing's Deep Search is earning fans.
Google is the big fish, though, and as the market leader in traditional search it needs to move slowly. That's a good thing for the news media, since widely applying AI Overviews to news stories would devastate the referral traffic publishers depend on. However, we may be seeing the first twitches that Google is moving in that direction.
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When will Google aim AI Overviews at news?
If there's a bright spot in all the gloom and doom surrounding the media industry these days, it might be on page 9 of the Reuters Institute report on Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025. There, in a simple line graph, is evidence that the primary way most news publishers find audience — Google Search — is still strong.
Citing data from Chartbeat, a traffic analytics company, the graph shows that contrary to what you might expect given the rise over the past several months of AI-powered search engines (which summarize content instead of simply linking to it), referral traffic from search among news publishers has actually been relatively stable over the past year. If anything, there's been a slight uptick.
That seems a bit incongruous — conventional wisdom suggests the opposite. There's been an ocean of digital ink spilled about the threat to news posed by AI Overviews ever since Google launched them last spring. However, their existence doesn't appear to have significantly impacted publisher traffic.
The statistical picture hasn't stopped publishers from worrying for their future. Among the journalists and media executives surveyed for the report, 74% of them said they were either somewhat or extremely worried about a decline in search referrals due to AI potentially summarizing and substituting their work.
A few important points about the data:
Chartbeat's data is aggregate, meaning any individual publishers complaining that search referrals have been dropping aren't lying, but those declines are being offset by increases in other parts of the ecosystem.
Google News traffic isn't represented in the data. That said, it shouldn't be wildly out of whack with the pattern since Google News has so far not been affected by AI Overviews.
While AI Overviews initially appeared in as much as 20% of Google search results, it's since dialed back the feature, with a number of studies pegging the current portion of searches with AI Overviews at about 4%. (Google didn't respond to a request for the official statistic.)
All this, especially the Overviews rollback, might suggest the death of search traffic has been greatly exaggerated, and all the panic around it is just Chicken Littling. However, there's a more recent indicator that gives reason to worry.
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