Evidence Grows That Google’s AI Overviews Have Eviscerated the Media Industry
An SEO firm's analysis of 10 major tech outlets found that US Google traffic to those sites dropped from a peak of 112 million monthly visits to under 50 million since AI Overviews launched — with Digital Trends losing 97% of its traffic and outlets like The Verge and ZDNet each down over 85%. The sharpest declines came in mid-2025 when Google expanded AI Overviews to cover roughly 25% of all searches. Google called the analysis "fundamentally flawed," pointing to shifting content preferences toward podcasts and forums.
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Editor's Note: Google is playing a dangerous game — and it knows it. Terrified of losing users to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a wave of AI competitors, the company rushed AI Overviews into search without stopping to ask what happens to the ecosystem that made Google Search valuable in the first place. The answer is now becoming clear: it collapses. When Google summarizes a page so users never need to click through, it cuts off the traffic that keeps that page alive. Digital Trends lost 97% of its Google traffic. The Verge and ZDNet — over 85%. And it's not just media outlets. Expert blogs, specialized forums, independent reviewers, niche databases — every source of quality information on the web runs on the same fuel: visitors. Cut that off, and the void doesn't stay empty. It fills with AI-generated junk — cheap, confident-sounding, SEO-optimized content that costs almost nothing to produce and has no one behind it who actually understands the subject. So Google, in a panic to compete with chatbots, is burning down the library to heat the building. The quality content AI Overviews depend on is disappearing precisely because of AI Overviews. What's left to summarize when the experts stop writing? The irony is almost poetic: in trying not to lose the AI race, Google may have destroyed the thing that made it indispensable — access to real, human knowledge. A few years from now, we might look back at today's internet as the golden age we didn't appreciate while we had it.