AI search results have publishers on the back foot to maintain audiences
Google traffic to news sites has shrunk by a third over the past year. Between November 2024 and November 2025, organic search traffic to over 2,500 websites worldwide dropped 33% according to data from analytics firm Chartbeat. The figures, published in a report by Reuters Institute, draw a worrying picture for publishers who have relied on search traffic for years.
Publishers in the lifestyle segment in particular are feeling the pinch from Google’s AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results.
Exactly how much of the decline is due to these AI answers is uncertain. What is clear, however, is that Anthropic is the worst referrer and Google scores the best: one referral for every three pages crawled.
Expectations for the coming years are equally bleak. Publishers reckon search engine traffic will fall by 43% over the next three years. So not a complete ‘Google Zero’, but still a big drain on an industry already facing declining social media revenues.
Over the past three years, Facebook’s referrals plummeted 43% and X’s by as much as 46%. Google Search was the safety net for a long time, but that source too is now starting to dry up. According to Chartbeat figures, Google Discover’s global traffic fell 2% year-on-year, while Google Search slumped 33%.
The Reuters survey further showed that among European publishers, the big decline has actually yet to kick in. At least the contraction figures are not as large as in the US.
The shift is forcing news organisations to radically rethink their strategies. YouTube tops the priority list this year with a net score of +74 percentage points, up sharply from last year. Other video platforms such as TikTok (+56pp) and Instagram (+41pp) are also gaining traction.
At the same time, publishers are struggling with how to relate to AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. These get a priority score of +61pp. Although these services hardly generate any traffic.
Google Discover remains an important, albeit erratic, traffic source for publishers with a score of +19pp. Newsletter platforms such as Substack (+8pp) are cautiously being explored as new channels to reach readers.
At the other end of the spectrum are the losers. Traditional search engine optimisation for Google gets a score of -25, meaning publishers will put less energy into it. Facebook (-23) and especially X (-52) are increasingly being ignored. BlueSky suggests nothing in the strategies of publishers worldwide.
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