Main information shops are in disaster mode as synthetic intelligence chatbots pushed by Google and different Large Tech giants crush web site visitors.
Google has rolled out an “AI Overviews” characteristic in its search engine that demotes conventional “blue links” to different websites in favor of auto-generated summaries. Final month, the search large rolled out “AI Mode” – which is anticipated to make the issue even worse by reply to go looking queries with chatbot-style conversations and few direct hyperlinks.
Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of stories outlet The Atlantic, instructed workers earlier this yr that they need to assume visitors from Google will drop towards zero over time, in response to a report from the Wall Avenue Journal on Tuesday.
“Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” Thompson instructed the Journal. “We have to develop new strategies.”
Dwindling visitors is hurting income for cash-strapped newsrooms and fueling layoffs. When Enterprise Insider slashed 21% of its employees in a newsroom-wide culling final month, its high boss Barbara Peng mentioned the transfer was meant to assist “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”
Visitors to Enterprise Insider’s web site plunged by a whopping 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, in response to information from analytics websites Similarweb cited by the Journal.
HuffPost has additionally misplaced greater than half of its visitors over the identical interval, the information confirmed, whereas the Washington Submit – one other newsroom racked by job cuts – has misplaced almost half its search viewers.
The rollout of AI-generated summaries instead of hyperlinks “is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated,” Washington Submit CEO William Lewis mentioned.
Google didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
Regardless of the visitors losses, Google has claimed that it’s nonetheless funneling visitors to information websites by search.
Critics, such because the Information Media Alliance – a commerce group that represents lots of of stories shops together with The Submit – has warned that AI Overviews and different Google-implemented AI options can have devastating penalties for the trade.
They allege that Google and different AI giants have used information content material to coach their chatbots with out correct credit score or compensation – after which used those self same merchandise to erode visitors.
Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of Information Media Alliance, blasted Googles’ rollout of AI Mode final month as “theft.”
“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” Coffey mentioned. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”
The AI push comes as Google faces intense stress from the feds over its enterprise mannequin – together with losses in a pair of antitrust instances introduced by the DOJ that might drive a breakup of the corporate.
US District Decide Amit Mehta is ready to determine by August on the way to break up Google’s unlawful dominance over on-line search after labeling the corporate as a “monopolist” in an preliminary ruling final yr. DOJ legal professionals need Mehta to think about the long run influence of AI when crafting cures.
Elsewhere, Google lately misplaced a separate DOJ case during which it was decided to have two unlawful monopolies over digital promoting expertise.
In that case, US District Decide Leonie Brinkema touched on the influence to information shops, discovering that Google’s “exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”
The treatment section of the digital ad tech trial will start in September.
