Don't panic
Google's AI Mode isn't the end of the internet as we know it—yet. Plus: Time gets talky, journalists brace for the AI future, and more.
As the world wakes up to the dawn of an AI-mediated internet, publishers are in a race to get out of the clicks business. While that's probably healthy, the rush to diversify shouldn't exaggerate what's happening. We're still a long way from Google Zero, and the data, at least at this point, suggests it would take radical change to get us there. Not that radical change won't happen, but it’s probably further out than some recent headlines might suggest.
More on that in a minute, but first I'd love to highlight a few things I'm up to next week:
Tuesday (6/24) marks the first class in the two-session AI for Journalists class I'm offering in partnership with The Upgrade. And we've still got a couple of spots left! Sign up here to snag one before they're gone.
Then on Thursday (6/26), I'm excited to join PRSA's Impact25 Conference in New York City to give the audience some practical advice on applying AI in their work. If you know my demos, you know I don't do fluff, and my 3 p.m. session will be 90 minutes of hands-on techniques you can start using right away.
Finally, I'm thrilled to have made journalism.co.uk's list of 75 expert voices at the intersection of AI and journalism! It's an honor to be included alongside so many smart and innovative thinkers, including Jane Barrett of Reuters, David Caswell of Storyflow, and Florent Daudens at Hugging Face—who's coincidentally going to be this week's guest on tomorrow's Media Copilot podcast, so look forward to nerding out on some next-level AI advice from someone in the thick of it.
OK, now about panicking…
Google AI Mode is here, but it’s not doomsday yet
If parts of the media world still hadn't gotten the memo that AI search engines were coming to eat up their referral traffic, it hit with a bullet last week when The Wall Street Journal published a piece of news analysis that declared, "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools."
Citing data from Similarweb, the article showed that search traffic to major news sites has been steadily declining since 2022, and that Google's AI Overviews and its recently launched AI Mode were poised to push it down even further. The picture served as a backdrop for contrasting the different approaches media companies are taking, from the drastic layoffs of Business Insider to the long, deliberate pivot away from clicks of Dotdash Meredith.
It all seems to make sense… until you remember ChatGPT wasn't even a thing in 2022. The relatively recent arrival of AI search engines is really only the period at the end of this sentence—Google referrals were on their way down long before chatbots started nibbling away at them. In fact, Google began surfacing answers in search results well over a decade ago; AI Overviews are just the latest flavor.
Really, the trend of falling search referrals has been an ongoing issue for media companies for at least the last four to five years. Those who saw the trend, planned around it, and diversified their revenue and audience strategies are now in a much better position than those who didn't.
That's not to say AI's potential to impact search traffic even further isn't real. It definitely is, and I've been sounding alarm bells about it for months. But now that the din of those alarm bells has reached the mainstream, a reality check is probably in order.
The fact is AI activity is still minuscule when compared to traditional search. From April 2024 to March 2025, AI chatbot queries accounted for just under 3% of all search queries, according to a study from One Little Web, an SEO marketing agency. They're growing at an impressive clip, with usage growing 125% year over year, but characterizing AI search as "crushing" regular search is probably overstating it, at least for now.
That said, all that data predates the release of Google AI Mode, so surely that will make a difference? It might, but I suspect not much of one. As I've mentioned before, AI Mode currently requires the user to deliberately engage with it. It's not the default on Google.com, and there's no way to make it the default in Chrome. Until AI Mode becomes easily accessible in your browser omnibox, where most searches take place, it's not going to make a dent in traditional search.
Isn't Google destined to do just that, though? I think there's no question Google sees AI Mode as the future of search, so one day it will be everywhere—including the omnibox—but if there's persuasive data that this won't happen quickly, it's in Google's earnings report. Last quarter it earned about $50 billion solely from advertising on keyword ads in search results. By comparison, ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews are nascent. It's going to take a while for advertisers to even understand them, let alone pay a premium. Google quite simply can't afford to push AI too quickly.
It seems certain that AI search will one day eclipse traditional Googling. It's more convenient for a large number of queries, and, though the technology is not without its problems, it's getting better by the day. So if you're a publisher, yes, you should worry. You should also plan and adapt. But don't panic. Search traffic will not go to zero overnight. It turns out you can only redesign a plane so fast if you want it to keep it in the air.
The Chatbox
All the AI news that matters to media*
Time gives news a voice
When Time debuted its AI experiences with Person of the Year last December, I could tell they weren't just experimenting. Whatever you thought of the actual feature, it was considered and polished—and the tip of the spear of an ongoing AI audience strategy. Now Time is going beyond summarization and chatbots, launching a feature called AI Audio Brief. Clearly modeled after Google's NotebookLM, the short audio overview of the day's headlines features two synthetic voices called Henry and Lucy (named after Time founder Henry Luce). Users can adjust the overall length of the brief but only between small and large sizes, and so far it only seems to be available on the Time website and not podcast platforms. It's a step forward, but a cautious one.
BI, NYT talk new AI audio experiences at Cannes
If you were a media executive, it would have been hard to avoid Cannes Lions this week, and the event marked the first time Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng commented publicly on the company's much-publicized layoffs, saying they were necessary "to build a sustainable business." She pointed to BI's new audio briefing—a personalized audio overview of the day's top stories, automatically updated as new stories come in—as an element of the publication's new strategy. Audio is definitely a recurring theme among news websites, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien speaking at a different Cannes event about how its partnership with Amazon would bring the Times' journalism to "a range of Amazon products," including presumably Alexa. It's doubtful AI audio briefings will be the next big thing in news, but no one's going to turn down a small thing.
Brace for the AI tsunami in YouTube Shorts
YouTube's integration of Google's Veo 3 AI video generator into Shorts, reported by the Hollywood Reporter, is a significant evolution of the platform's relationship with synthetic content. CEO Neal Mohan announced at Cannes Lions the feature would come later this summer, positioning the tool as democratizing video creation for "anyone with a voice." But more than 25% of YouTube Partner Program creators earn money from Shorts, and they now face potential displacement by users who can generate polished videos from simple text prompts. Unlike previous AI tools, Veo 3 creates full eight-second clips with both video and audio, making it perfectly suited for the Shorts format. The timing is particularly striking given YouTube's recent loosening of content moderation policies, suggesting the platform is prioritizing growth over quality control. (AI-assisted)
Google turns search into a literal chatbot
Speaking of voices, Google's Search Live feature transforms its AI Mode into a conversational search engine that can hold back-and-forth verbal exchanges, complete with web links. While it's currently limited to U.S. users enrolled in Google Labs, the feature is a competitor to other voice AI features in Perplexity and ChatGPT. The feature runs on a custom version of Gemini and uses Google's "query fan-out technique" to surface a wider array of web content, addressing one of the key criticisms of AI search tools: their tendency to rely on limited sources. Also notable: The ability to continue conversations while using other apps. That could suggest Google is betting that voice will become a much bigger interface for information discovery than it is today. (AI-assisted)
Newsrooms have quietly embraced AI tools
Muck Rack's State of Journalism 2025 survey reveals that AI adoption among reporters has crossed a critical threshold, with 77% now using AI tools in their work—a figure that should give pause to any newsroom still treating artificial intelligence as taboo. The data shows ChatGPT leading the pack at 42% adoption, followed by transcription tools at 40% and writing assistants like Grammarly at 35%. Even more telling is what journalists aren't doing: only 18% cite "unregulated or unchecked use of AI in journalism" as a top concern, ranking it well below disinformation, funding issues, and public trust. This suggests the industry has moved past knee-jerk resistance toward pragmatic integration, which aligns with growing evidence that AI stigma in journalism is indeed fading. (AI-assisted)
*Some items are AI-assisted. For more on what this means, see this note.