Is Google's AI Overview Taking Away News Publishers' Traffic?
The one crucial question has echoed across editorial meetings and strategy rooms now,
Is Google’s AI Overview taking a bite out of our search traffic?
It’s a fair concern. The rollout of Google’s AI Overviews, those intelligent summaries placed right at the top of search results, marks a fundamental shift in how content is discovered.
Google AI overviews are positioned as a natural evolution of featured snippets. They promise more nuanced, multi-source responses to user queries. However, for content-driven businesses, especially news publishers, this raises critical questions.
To address the publisher's concern, we analysed our publisher's traffic over the past year to understand the impact of Google AI overviews.
What do We Study?
At Quintype, we believe decisions must be data-led. With growing concerns from our partner publishers about declining visibility and shifting discovery patterns, we felt a responsibility to move beyond speculation.
Instead of relying solely on industry chatter, we turned to real traffic data from our network to see if there was any measurable shift post-AI overview rollout.
This was not a one-off snapshot. We tracked traffic patterns over 15 months across different geographies, formats, and audience sizes, all to understand whether AI overviews are a silent disruptor or just one of many evolving signals in the ecosystem.
We collected traffic data from 15 publishers, with monthly visitor numbers ranging from 1 million to 10 million. The duration varied from January 2024 to March 2025.
Why that window?
August 2024 marked a noticeable uptick in AI overview visibility in most countries. We used this as our logical midpoint for comparison before and after.
What Does Publisher Data Reveal?
Some publishers saw an uptick post-August. Others experienced steady or even declining traffic.
But here is the catch: these fluctuations didn’t align neatly with the AI overview expansion. They could just as easily be attributed to content mix, algorithmic updates, seasonal shifts, or changes in reader behaviour.
Based on the traffic trends across the publisher, there is no clear, uniform pattern that directly ties changes in page views to the rollout of Google’s AI overviews. Some publishers experienced temporary spikes, while others saw dips, and many maintained steady traffic throughout the period.
The traffic fluctuations occurred both before and after August 2024. The point at which AI overviews became more prominent indicates that other factors, such as content strategy, seasonal events, audience behaviour, or unrelated algorithm changes, likely played a more significant role.
In several cases, growth or decline aligned more closely with editorial choices or campaign pushes than with any systemic change from Google, which is what we could understand.
This suggests that while AI overviews may subtly influence content discovery, they have not yet led to a significant disruption in publisher traffic.
However, the long-term implications are strategic rather than statistical. Publishers with unique, deep, or branded content appear more resilient, while those relying heavily on generic or SEO-first approaches may be more vulnerable to zero-click behaviours.
The takeaway is clear: differentiation, direct audience engagement, and reduced reliance on organic search are becoming essential for sustainable growth in an AI-assisted discovery landscape.
What the Industry Is Saying?
Large publishing houses such as Dotdash Meredith and Ziff Davis have stated that they observed a negligible effect on their overall traffic following the introduction of AI overviews.
Semrush's analysis, examining data from May 2024 to February 2025, found no statistically significant evidence of a decrease in traffic attributable to AI overviews.
Yet, not everyone is convinced. Especially smaller publishers, who tend to rely heavily on organic discovery and are more sensitive to changes in ranking. Informational queries, the bread and butter of most newsrooms, are precisely the kind most vulnerable to “zero-click” answers served by AI.
The Real Friction: Transparency
One of the biggest frustrations of the publishers is the lack of visibility.
Currently, Google Search Console doesn’t break out clicks or impressions from AI-generated overviews. That leaves publishers flying blind, unsure whether their content is helping feed these summaries, and if so, whether it’s driving any meaningful return traffic.
Bottom Line
Is AI overview killing news publisher traffic?
Not yet and maybe not ever, across the board.
Is it changing the rules of the search game?
Absolutely.
The most innovative publishers are not waiting to find out what happens.
They are adapting in real time, watching data closely, rethinking distribution, and investing in content that is harder for AI to summarise and easier for humans to remember.