“RIP traffic.” That’s what The Rebooting’s Brian Morrisey warned of in 2023, citing declines in social and search traffic alongside fears about AI search’s impact on publishers.
Unfortunately, the future is now for many web publishers since Google has rolled out a new AI Mode with the potential to rock the status quo of search traffic worldwide.
Launched quietly last month to a small section of users, AI Mode basically turns Google into a chatbot, able to answer long, detailed questions powered by the company’s Gemini 2.0 chatbot and the company’s all-powerful search index.
In a video shared on social media, Google VP of Product Robby Stein asked AI Mode, “What’s the latest with Kyrie Irving’s injury?” In the past, Google would have responded with links to prominent sports publishers reporting the news on Irving’s injury that users would have needed to click into.
But AI Mode’s response was more along the lines of what you’d see in ChatGPT or Perplexity — a direct answer to the question: “Kyrie Irving, the star guard for the Dallas Mavericks, has suffered a torn ACL in his left knee and will miss the remainder of the 2024-25 NBA season.”
The response did include small hyperlink icons, presumably to credible websites with more information on Irving’s injury. However, the graphics are so small it’s likely most users would bypass them, while others might be leery of clicking a link without knowing where Google was sending them. There is also a horizontal carousel of links shown above the response.
Why click a link for more info when Google is answering your question? In addition to the response above, Google also provided bullet points with further information detailing Irving’s injury, its impact on the Maverick’s season, and what it means for his future. All of this was written by Google using information scraped from news organizations that spent money to report the facts in the first place.
To be clear, Google is careful to describe AI Mode as an “experiment,” but so was AI Overviews, which is now a default feature for most Google search users. With both, the tech giant appears to be tearing up its central bargain with news publishers: “We’ll send you lots of traffic in exchange for letting us crawl your site and feature your content in our search results.”
“While right now, AI Mode is separate from search, if it succeeds, I suspect it will gradually merge into the main Google search results page,” Platform’s Casey Newton said on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, which he co-hosts with tech columnist Kevin Roose.
Google certainly isn’t taking this step lightly, considering its search business brought in $54 billion worth of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2024. So why move to potentially undermine its top source of revenue and clout? Competition.
For the first time in a decade, Google’s global search market share dropped below 90% in the final three months of 2024, according to an analysis by Search Engine Land. Google remains the dominant global search engine. (Microsoft’s Bing, the second-most popular search engine, commands just 4% of the global search market.) However, there is a growing sign that competitors powered by AI chatbots are making inroads in Google’s position.
“I think Google realizes this is a once-in-a-generation chance to reinvent the search experience, and that is going to mean a fundamentally different way of presenting information,” Newton said.
One thing that remains unclear is how much new Google features like AI Overviews and featured snippets — which pull answers directly from an article without a user needing to click through to the website — are impacting traffic. The company has long said it expects more clicks for publishers, but that hasn’t been the experience of most SEO editors I’ve spoken with over the past year.
In The Rebooting latest research report, a survey of 97 publishing executives conducted in partnership with Omeda, the findings weren’t shocking. Half of publishers reported search traffic declined over the past year, while traffic from social media platforms continued to shrink.
“We started to look at search traffic as a nice to have more than anything else,” Aron Pilhofer, the chief product officer at the Star-Tribune, told me last year. Pilhofer said that while search traffic was down overall, Google still provided decent traffic from users — specifically including “Star-Tribune” in their queries — “search with intent,” as he described.
Chegg, an online education company that provides test answers to students, is currently suing Google in federal district court, claiming the company’s summaries of search results have caused its $15-a-month subscription service to collapse. The core question will sound familiar to news publishers — why pay Chegg if Google will display its content for free in its search results?
“Traffic is being blocked from ever coming to Chegg because of Google’s [AI Overview] and their use of Chegg’s content to keep visitors on their platform,” Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz said during their February earnings call.
Google has called Chegg’s claims “meritless,” claiming in a statement to Reuters that AI Overviews make search more helpful and valuable for users.
“Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” according to spokesperson Jose Castaneda.
Stein made a similar remark on social media last month when asked if Google was removing the incentive for users to click through to a publisher’s website.
“The team is really focused on how we make it easy to click to sites — we have a lot more UI updates coming that we showed in our announcement post,” Stein wrote. “It's something we hear from users that they want, and it’s core to how we build AI Mode. Also, AI Mode will respond to new types of questions, let people ask follow-ups to explore different facets, and ultimately create new opportunities for sites to rank.”
That’s not very reassuring for news publishers, considering all the evidence to the contrary.
Who knows what will happen? Could Google be forced to pull back if AI Mode tells people they should eat rocks or put glue on their pizza so the cheese doesn’t fall off? Sure, since that also happened to AI Overviews. However, AI Mode is likely the first step in how more people search for content in the 21st century.
So, how should newsrooms prepare? Focus on making direct connections with your readers, rely more on newsletters and your homepage for traffic than Google search, and double down on efforts to create relevant and indispensable content about your community — stuff the AI spambots can’t easily match.
Newsrooms also shouldn’t give up on Google quite yet. Google Discover has been an important traffic source for many publishers. It remains essential to have some SEO as part of your workflow to ensure every published article has the best chance of finding a search audience — even if that audience diminishes daily.
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.
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