This article was AI-generated as part of an experimental historical-content project. The date reflects the period being analyzed rather than the date the article was originally written.
When publishers worry about Google, they usually worry about rankings. Dropping from third to ninth hurts, but it is a familiar kind of pain. What has news executives anxious right now is different. An article can rank perfectly well and still lose its reader, because the answer shows up before the link does.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that publishers are scrambling to understand what AI Overviews, shown to everyone in the U.S. since mid-May, will do to the traffic their business depends on. Frank Pine, who runs editorial at MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, told the paper the summaries potentially choke off “the original creators of the content.”
What is known, and what is not
Not much is settled yet. Publishers interviewed by the Times said it was too early to see a difference in their numbers. Digiday cited Raptive’s estimate that Overviews could cut visits by as much as 25 percent, a figure its chief innovation officer now thinks may be on the low end. Semrush, meanwhile, found Overviews on fewer than half a percent of results pages, and far fewer for news queries. Google says the links inside an overview get more clicks than the same page would get as a regular listing. It has not published the data behind that.
Nobody outside Google knows the size of the effect. The dependency is not in doubt. Similarweb data cited by Digiday put Google at 72 percent of Forbes’ organic traffic in April.
How a news brand becomes substrate
The traffic question gets the attention. The reputation question is quieter.
A large part of what made a news brand valuable online was being the destination. The reader saw the masthead, the byline, the date, the editorial framing. Even a skim of the first paragraph was an encounter with that brand’s judgment. In an overview, the reporting is still there, but as raw material. The masthead shrinks to a small source link that many readers will not open.
Being used is not the same as being seen. A publisher can supply the facts behind the answer and get little of the credit that builds trust over time. The Times made a related point in its lawsuit against OpenAI: a brand’s credibility travels with a machine’s retelling, accurate or not.
There is also a second-order effect that matters to every company that gets covered. A news article about a dispute carries its own structure: the allegation, the context, the paragraph where the company responds. A summary has every reason to keep the claim and compress the rest. If the response is in paragraph nine, it may not make it into three sentences at the top of Google.
What the options look like
Publishers’ choices are awkward. As the Times noted, a site can stop Google from showing snippets of its content, but then its links appear without descriptions, which makes them less likely to be clicked. There is no clean way to stay in search and stay out of the summary.
For communications teams, a few things follow. Check how Overviews render the coverage about your company, not just your own pages. Make sure your side of a contested story exists somewhere it can be cited directly, stated plainly, rather than only as a quote buried in someone else’s article. The first-month monitoring routine still applies, with one addition: note when an overview cites a news story about you, and compare what the summary kept with what the article actually said.
For publishers, the immediate ask is the one Raptive is making: data. What share of queries trigger an overview, and how do clicks behave when one appears? Without that, everyone is arguing from estimates.
The click was a habit, not a contract
For two decades, publishers effectively traded content for traffic. Google showed a headline and a snippet, and enough people clicked. Nobody wrote that down as a promise. It was a habit of the interface. As an earlier post on the shift to default Overviews argued, the first impression on Google has moved. The next few months will show whether the click moves with it, or stays behind.