For over a decade, news publishers have basically built their business models around generating traffic on Google Search. Turns out, this may have been shortsighted.
Driving the news: Google’s foray into fusing AI and Search is throttling traffic to news websites, as detailed in a new Wall Street Journal article. The widespread rollout of Google’s AI Overview has pushed Search’s classic blue links farther down the page. And the chatbot-like AI Mode, currently being piloted in the U.S., could do even more damage.
- Between April 2022 and April 2025, organic search traffic fell by about 50% for publishers including the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Business Insider — the latter recently conducted sizable layoffs as a direct result of the plummeting clicks.
Why it matters: This trend could mark the beginning of what The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, dubbed “Google Zero”: the moment when Google straight up stops directing traffic to third-party publishers, cutting out search results and providing answers all by itself.
- The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, thinks this is the case, telling the company this year that it should operate on the assumption that Google traffic will disappear.
What’s next: Publishers will have to find ways to reach audiences that don’t rely on search, whether it’s newsletters or a New York Times-level investment in games. The most likely result, though, will be deals letting developers scrape content to train AI models.—QH