Google’s pivot to AI-powered search is proving disastrous for the digital news media landscape.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company’s latest tools, including its wildly hallucinating AI Overviews and chatbot-style AI Mode, are causing the traffic being sent to publishers to plummet as users no longer feel the need to click through to the actual source of information, cutting already-slammed journalists off from ad revenue and subscriptions.
It’s an existential threat. News publications, already gutted by the internet, have been hit hard as they try to adapt to a post-organic-search world.
Per the WSJ, search traffic to Business Insider’s media empire fell by a whopping 55 percent between April 2022 and April 2025. Last month, the company cut roughly 21 percent of its staff, with CEO Barbara Peng noting that it had to “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”
How to respond to this existential threat remains a major point of contention.
“Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson told the WSJ. “We have to develop new strategies.”
Some publications, like the New York Times, are taking legal action, with the newspaper suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
It’s a thorny debate, with publishers accusing the AI industry of exploiting their content without ever fairly remunerated. Plummeting traffic due to AI-enhanced search on Google is only exacerbating the tension.
Google is under threat from AI itself. Apple executive Eddy Cue admitted in federal court earlier this year that Google searches in the company’s Safari browser had fallen for the first time in 20 years, indicating the end of traditional search as we know it could be nigh.
Confusingly, Google has since disputed the claim and has remained adamant that its number of total searches is still going up — while going all-in on its glitchy AI products.
“This is the moment that propels us forward in our ability to achieve our mission and really deliver a transformed search experience for users,” Google’s head of knowledge and information division Nick Fox told Adweek.
The digital media landscape and Google are now caught in an unfortunate race to the bottom. The tech giant’s search and AI features rely on a steady stream of news and original content. But by cutting the creators of that material out of a once lucrative organic search-driven revenue source, that stream could soon be reduced to a trickle, if not an incestuous swamp of AI-generated nonsense.
Well-established outlets will likely weather the storm better. Research revealed last week that Google’s AI Overviews favors major news outlets, while smaller publications struggle for visibility.
Meanwhile, the media industry has no other option but to look for new business models in light of an existential threat.
Legal challenges to Google’s indiscriminate scraping of copyrighted materials are likely to continue to crop up as well.
“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” said trade association News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey in a statement last month, following Google’s announcement of its AI Mode feature. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft.”
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