Google’s AI search changes upended online publishing

This is The Stepback , a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI’s impact on the web, follow Emma Roth . The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here .

The digital publishing industry has relied on Google for a very long time. Many outlets spent time and money optimizing their webpages to show up at the top of the search engine, with the goal of getting readers to click on their articles or discover their websites for the first time. For years, the relationship between Google and publishers was largely reciprocal; online publishers filled out Google’s search index with content, while Google supplied publications with exposure and traffic.

But that relationship has changed. The launch of Google’s AI search features — coupled with changes to the way it ranks search results — has made it harder for publishers to survive on traffic from Google alone. In 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews, a feature that slots an AI-generated search result summarizing pages from across the web at the very top of Google Search, with links to sources its AI system determines to be the most useful placed below the summary. Instead of vying for clicks on the first page of Search, publishers became beholden to an AI system that regurgitates results, with no guarantee that users will actually click on the source of that information.

Though Google’s AI Overviews got off to a shaky start , the feature immediately raised concerns among publishers, with the News/Media Alliance saying it will be “catastrophic” to web traffic. A 2024 investigation from the Press Gazette found that Google’s AI Overviews appeared for almost a quarter of news-related searches in May 2024. By August, the outlet found that AI Overviews had begun impacting the visibility of publishers by replacing media sites that previously held the top spots on Google’s search engine for certain queries.

A future where Google could eventually stop sending traffic to outside sites on the web has only gotten closer as the company builds out its vision for an AI-powered search. In May 2025, it launched AI Mode , a feature that replaces Google’s standard search engine with a chatbot-like interface that provides detailed summaries from results on the web.

The concerns raised by the News/Media Alliance were real: Traffic to online publishers tanked following the launch of Google’s AI search features. A June 2025 report from The Wall Street Journal revealed how traffic to Business Insider , The Washington Post , HuffPost , and the WSJ itself has declined since 2022. Data from analytics company Similarweb suggested that search traffic to The New York Times sank from 44 percent to 35.5 percent in three years, the WSJ reported.