Australia’s news industry is facing an existential crisis. For two decades, Google Search has been the primary pipeline delivering readers to news websites, but that era is ending.
Multiple independent research studies show news platforms worldwide—including Australian outlets—are experiencing catastrophic traffic declines as Google’s AI Overviews answer readers’ questions without requiring them to click through to publisher websites.
The News Industry Traffic Collapse
The numbers from trusted research sources paint a grim picture for news organisations.
Aggregating across the entire news sector, organic traffic to news websites plummeted from a peak of 2.3 billion monthly visits in mid-2024 to under 1.7 billion by May 2025—a loss exceeding 600 million monthly visits in less than one year.
Major news organisations have been hit particularly hard:
- CNN suffered traffic declining between 27% and 38% year-over-year
- Business Insider experienced a 55% decline in organic search traffic between April 2022 and April 2025
- Forbes and HuffPost both recorded 50% traffic losses
- The Washington Post lost 40% of its traffic, NBC News declined 42%, and Mail Online dropped 44%
- DMG Media, which owns MailOnline and Metro, reports nearly 90% declines for certain searches
Google Traffic Decline by Major Publisher
Year-over-year traffic losses from Google AI Overviews (2024-2025)
*DMG Media represents declines for certain specific searches. Data compiled from multiple industry research sources.
Australian news organisations are experiencing the same brutal reality. Some Australian news platforms report traffic drops of up to 35% from Google searches since AI Overviews began appearing, with smaller outlets reporting warnings of layoffs and financial strain.
According to Chartbeat data, organic Google search traffic declined 33% globally from November 2024 to November 2025, and dropped 38% in the United States over the same period. The median news publisher experienced a 7% year-over-year traffic decline in the first half of 2025.
How AI Overviews Are Destroying Click-Through Rates
Google has tweaked its algorithm many times over the years, but AI Overviews represent something fundamentally different. Previous changes shifted which sites appeared at the top of results. AI Overviews eliminate the need to click through to sites at all.
The Pew Research Centre tracked 68,000 real search queries and found that users clicked on results 8% of the time when AI summaries appeared, compared to 15% without them—a 46.7% relative reduction. Even more concerning, less than 1% of users clicked on links within the AI Overview itself.
According to Similarweb data, zero-click searches increased from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025. This means the majority of Google searches now end without any click to a website.
Seer Interactive’s September 2025 study analysing 3,119 informational queries found organic click-through rates plummeted 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61%, for queries with AI Overviews.
Research using Google Search Console data showed the average click-through rate for the top-ranking result fell from 7.3% in March 2024 to just 2.6% in March 2025—a 34.5% decrease when AI Overviews appear.
Digital Content Next’s member data spanning 19 companies showed that over eight weeks in May and June 2025, median Google Search referral traffic was down almost every week, with losses outpacing gains two-to-one. The worst weeks saw news brands plunge 16% and non-news fall 17%.
The Rapid Expansion of AI Overviews
Google isn’t pulling back on this feature. In January 2025, AI Overviews appeared for 6.49% of queries.
By March 2025, this had more than doubled to 13.14%—a 102% increase in just two months. The feature now appears in over 200 countries and 40 languages following a May 2025 expansion.
In October 2025, Google introduced AI Mode in Australia—an enhanced search experience that in many cases replaces blue links with conversational summaries.
As of mid-2025, AI Overviews appear in approximately 13-19% of all searches, with this percentage rising steadily.
AI Overviews: The Feature Reshaping News Discovery
AI Overviews are Google’s AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results, synthesising information from multiple web sources to answer queries directly within the search page.
Launched in May 2024 at Google’s I/O conference, the feature began as “Search Generative Experience” before being renamed AI Overviews.
The feature’s impact on user behaviour is measurable and severe. Pew Research Centre’s analysis found that when AI Overviews appear, users click on traditional search results only 8% of the time, compared to 15% when no AI summary is present.
Even more critically, less than 1% of users click on the citation links embedded within the AI Overview itself—meaning the feature effectively answers queries without driving meaningful traffic to source websites.
For news organisations, this pattern is particularly devastating. DMG Media, publisher of MailOnline and Metro, reports click-through declines approaching 90% for searches where AI Overviews appear.
The pattern—where publishers’ content is used to generate answers while receiving minimal traffic in return—represents the core challenge facing the news industry as Google transforms from a search engine that connects users to websites into an answer engine that keeps users on Google.
The Impossible Bind for News Publishers
News publishers are in a bind because if they want to opt out of AI Overviews, they must opt out of Google Search entirely. Yet continuing to allow Google to use their content means watching traffic evaporate.
Helen Havlak, publisher of The Verge, said when people see AI summaries, they visit sites for information less often, noting “The Verge’s Google traffic has been declining, and I would say a lot of that decline has lined up pretty clearly with the rise of AI Overviews”.
The European Commission has taken notice.
On 9 December 2025, the European Commission launched a formal antitrust investigation examining whether Google violated EU competition rules by using publisher content for AI purposes without appropriate compensation or viable opt-out mechanisms.
How News Publishers Are Responding
Faced with this challenge, news publishers are pursuing several strategies:
The Verge is doubling down on subscriptions, pushing podcasts and newsletters, and making its website more like social media—allowing readers to follow writers and topics with a short-form feed mimicking an infinite news scroll.
Publishers surveyed said they expect to put less effort into traditional search optimisation going forward. 76% of media leaders plan to encourage their staff to behave more like creators in 2026 while half want to partner with creators to help distribute their content.
Some publishers are pursuing licensing agreements. Major news organisations like News Corp. and Axel Springer are striking licensing deals with AI companies, while The New York Times filed a federal copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.
What the Future Looks Like for News Organisations
Survey respondents expect traffic declines to reach 43% on average over the next three years, which the Reuters Institute report notes would be “not quite ‘Google Zero’ but a substantial impact none the less”.
Publishers surveyed expect search engine traffic to decline by 43% within three years, with a fifth of respondents expecting losses above 75%.
Stuart Forrest, global director of SEO digital publishing at Bauer Media, confirms: “We’re definitely moving into the era of lower clicks and lower referral traffic for publishers”.
Planning for the New Reality
The data from Pew Research Centre, Chartbeat, Similarweb, Digital Content Next, and other research organisations all point in the same direction: Google is becoming an “answer engine” rather than a search engine, and this structural shift is reducing traffic to news publisher websites.
News publishers who survive will need to:
- Build direct audience relationships through newsletters, memberships, and owned platforms that don’t depend on Google
- Diversify revenue streams beyond advertising tied to page views
- Create distinctive content that provides value beyond what AI summaries can offer
- Develop strong brand identity that brings readers directly to their sites
- Pursue fair compensation through licensing deals or regulatory action
The traffic declines are real, documented by multiple independent research organisations, and accelerating.
The question for news publishers is not whether this shift will continue, but how quickly they can adapt their business models to survive in a world where Google traffic is no longer the foundation of their audience development strategy.
