Mon, 08 Sep 2025

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 Publishers fear AI summaries are hitting online traffic

Google's AI overviews are diverting traffic away from online newspapers and other publications.

* Reach, owner of newspapers such as The Mirror and Daily Express, says that Google's AI Overviews feature has led to a fall in click-through rates by as much as 89%.
* Publishers worry that AI Overviews will lead to fewer people clicking through to their content, resulting in negative knock-on effects.
* Dr. Felix Simon, research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, says it's hard to know the scale of the problem because Google doesn't publish data on click-through rates.
* David Higgerson, chief digital publisher at Reach, says that publishers provide accurate and timely content that fuels Google, but don't get fairly rewarded in return.
* There is also concern over Google's new AI Mode tool, which shows search results in a conversational style with far fewer links than traditional search.
* Bauer Media's Stuart Forrest says the industry is moving into an era of lower clicks and referral traffic for publishers.
* A Google spokesperson says that the company prioritizes sending traffic to websites and continues to send billions of clicks every day.
* Some in the publishing industry are turning to the courts for redress, with a group of organizations filing a legal complaint to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority alleging that Google AI Overviews is using publishers' content at a cost to newspapers.
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