Google AI Overview: Google faces legal pressure, website traffic drops significantly
Google's AI Overview feature is significantly reducing website traffic from search engines, advertising revenue is plummeting.
Website traffic plummeted
Google is rolling out an AI Overview feature to compete with AI tools like ChatGPT. The feature provides a quick summary generated by AI Gemini and appears at the top of search results, along with a source link and a “See more” option.
Users can simply read the summary without clicking on the links below. This is especially harmful for websites that rely on advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.
According to data from Similarweb, search traffic to websites will drop by 55% from April 2022 to April 2025. Content sites like travel guides, health tips, and product reviews will be hit hard.
A Wall Street Journal report noted that many famous global news sites also lost large amounts of traffic:
HuffPost's traffic has more than halved in three years.
The Washington Post had a similar decline.
Business Insider had to cut 21% of its staff in May because of “a severe and out-of-control drop in traffic.”
The share of traffic from search to the New York Times website fell to just 36.5% in April 2025.
The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson predicts that Google traffic will eventually go to zero and calls for a change in its business model: “Google is moving from a search engine to an answer engine.”
Impact on SEO and ad revenue
A study by the Pew Research Center found that only a small fraction of 900 US Google users actually clicked through to the source page after viewing the Google AI Overview. Most just read the brief information and left.
The three most popular sources in Google AI Overviews are Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, accounting for about 15% of all cited sources.
Government pages appear at a higher rate in the Google AI Overview than in traditional search results, but both formats only cite press at a rate of 5%.
404 Media, a technology-focused website, said that many of its articles were aggregated by Google into the AI Overview without displaying the link, making it impossible for users to access the original article.
Previously, users accessed websites through Google to view free content, while also viewing Adsense ads, the lifeblood of most websites. But AI Overview eliminates the need for users to click, breaking this monetization cycle.
According to the BBC, about 68% of internet activity starts with a search engine, and 90% of that is through Google. Losing traffic from Google means losing revenue.
Google, however, was not affected. Parent company Alphabet recorded a record revenue of $96.4 billion in the last quarter of 2024, up 14% from the previous year. Advertising alone contributed $54.2 billion.
Because now Google inserts ads right in the AI summary, without having to direct users anywhere else.
SEO loses value, AI easily causes information distortion
According to The Register, click-through rates (CTR) for top search results with AI Summary have dropped by an average of 34.5%. Appearing on the first page of search results no longer carries as much value as it once did.
Not only does it reduce SEO effectiveness, AI Overview also faces the risk of spreading misinformation. Some of Google's answers were found to be based on data that had been synthesized by other AIs from previous AI sources, creating a chain of repeated misinformation.
Experts describe this as “a vicious cycle that leads to the collapse of artificial intelligence models themselves.”
Competition increases, 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 or affiliated with Google, a worrying ratio.
While still the market leader, Google is being challenged by rivals like Perplexity with AI-powered search engines.
Bank of America said the $14 billion investment in infrastructure in one quarter shows Google is more concerned about competition than expanding demand.
In addition, the US Department of Justice continues to accuse Google of monopoly and calls for the Chrome browser to be separated from the company. Google's new moves on advertising and AI could make the legal dispute even more tense.