Google AI Overview: Google faces legal pressure, resulting in a significant drop in website traffic.
Google's AI Overview feature is significantly reducing website traffic from its search engine, leading to a sharp drop in advertising revenue.
Website traffic has dropped significantly.
Google is rolling out an AI Overview feature to compete with AI tools like ChatGPT. This feature provides a quick summary generated by the Gemini AI and displays it at the top of search results, along with a source link and an "Learn more" option.
Users can simply read the summary without clicking on the links below. This is particularly detrimental to websites that rely on advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.
According to data from Similarweb, search traffic to websites decreased by 55% from April 2022 to April 2025. Content sites such as travel guides, health tips, and product reviews were heavily impacted.
A Wall Street Journal report noted that many popular global news sites also lost significant traffic:
HuffPost's traffic has decreased by more than half in 3 years.
The Washington Post experienced a similar decline.
Business Insider had to cut 21% of its staff in May due to a "severe and uncontrollable drop in traffic."
The percentage of traffic from search results to the New York Times website dropped to just 36.5% in April 2025.
Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, predicts that traffic from Google will gradually drop to zero and calls for a change in the business model: "Google is shifting from a search engine to an answer engine."
Impact on SEO and advertising revenue
Research from the Pew Research Center shows that only a small fraction of the 900 Google users in the US actually clicked on the source page after viewing the Google AI Overview. The majority only read the summary and left.
The three most popular sources in Google AI Overviews are Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, accounting for approximately 15% of all cited sources.
Government websites appear more frequently in the Google AI Overview than in traditional search results, but both formats only cite news at a 5% rate.
404 Media, a website specializing in in-depth technology, reports that many of their articles are being aggregated by Google into its AI Overview without displaying links, preventing users from accessing the original articles.
Previously, users accessed websites through Google to view free content while also seeing AdSense ads, the lifeblood of most websites. But AI Overview eliminates the need for users to click, disrupting this revenue cycle.
According to the BBC, approximately 68% of internet activity originates from search engines, and 90% of that is through Google. Losing traffic from Google means losing revenue.
However, Google was unaffected. Parent company Alphabet recorded record revenue of $96.4 billion in the last quarter of 2024, a 14% increase over the previous year. Advertising alone contributed $54.2 billion.
Because now Google inserts ads directly into the AI summary, without directing users anywhere else.
SEO loses value, AI easily leads to misinformation.
According to The Register, the click-through rate (CTR) for top-ranking search results pages with AI summaries has decreased by an average of 34.5%. Appearing on the first page of search results no longer offers the same value as it once did.
Besides reducing SEO effectiveness, AI Overview also faces the risk of spreading misinformation. Some of Google's answers have been found to be based on data already compiled by other AIs from previous AI sources, creating a chain of repeated misinformation.
Experts describe this as "a vicious cycle leading to the collapse of artificial intelligence models themselves."
With increased competition, Google faces legal pressure.
According to SparkToro, by 2024, only 360 out of 1,000 Google searches in the US will lead to pages not owned by or partnered with Google, a worrying percentage.
Despite still leading the market, Google is facing competition from rivals like Perplexity, which uses AI-powered search engines.
Bank of America said that Google's $14 billion investment in infrastructure in a single quarter shows it is more concerned about competition than about expanding demand.
In addition, the US Department of Justice continues to accuse Google of monopolistic practices and calls for the Chrome browser to be separated from the company. Google's new moves regarding advertising and AI could further intensify the legal dispute.
