Google’s transition to AI-powered search is having a devastating impact on the digital news media landscape. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the company’s latest tools, including AI Overviews and chatbot-style AI Mode, are drastically reducing the traffic sent to publishers. This decline is forcing news organizations to confront an existential threat as users increasingly rely on Google’s AI-driven summaries rather than clicking through to the original sources.
The consequences are severe. News publications, already struggling to adapt to the post-organic-search world, are being hit hard. Between April 2022 and April 2025, search traffic to Business Insider’s media empire plummeted by 55 percent. In response, the company was forced to cut 21 percent of its staff, with CEO Barbara Peng citing “extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”
Industry leaders are debating how to respond to this crisis. Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, noted that “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” and that news organizations “have to develop new strategies.” Some, like The New York Times, are taking legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, highlighting the growing tension between publishers and the AI industry.
The situation is further complicated by Google’s mixed messages about its search traffic. While Apple executive Eddy Cue testified in court that Google searches on Safari had declined for the first time in 20 years, Google disputed this claim, insisting that its total search numbers continue to rise. Despite this, the company’s push for AI-driven search products is transforming the digital media landscape.
Research has shown that Google’s AI Overviews tend to favor major news outlets, while smaller publications struggle for visibility. As the media industry searches for new business models, legal challenges to Google’s content scraping practices are likely to continue. Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, criticized Google’s AI Mode feature, stating that “links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft.”
As the digital media landscape evolves, established outlets may weather the storm better than smaller players. However, the industry as a whole faces a critical juncture, with the potential for AI-generated content to further disrupt the information ecosystem.
