AI search was supposed to help users. Instead, it’s draining the lifeblood of the web. Google’s AI Overviews are skyrocketing impressions but strangling site traffic. And the fallout is bigger than most think.
Here’s What Just Happened
One year after Google launched its AI Overviews feature, publishers are starting to see the cost.
The summaries appear at the top of search results, answering queries directly without requiring users to click through. Good for convenience — bad for the ecosystem that feeds Google’s results.
According to BrightEdge, AI Overviews boosted search impressions by 49%. But clicks to actual websites fell 30%.
That’s not just a blip. It’s part of a broader trend. SEO expert Kevin Indig found that when AI Overviews weren’t shown, outbound click rates jumped to 28% on desktop and 38% on mobile.
Other analytics confirm the dip. Ahrefs reported that AI Overviews dropped clickthroughs by 35%. SimilarWeb found search referral traffic declined across key categories: travel and tourism (-20%), news and media (-17%), e-commerce (-9%), finance (-7%), food and drink (-7%), and fashion/lifestyle (-5%).
AI search engines like Perplexity and Arc only make up about 10% of what traditional search referral traffic once delivered.
The problem? AI services are extracting value from the web — without returning traffic, clicks, or revenue. And the publishers who helped train these systems are watching their numbers plummet.
The Bigger Picture
What’s happening here isn’t just SEO turbulence. It’s a systemic shift in how value circulates across the internet.
Publishers spent years optimizing for Google’s old rules. Now, those rules have changed, and AI-generated answers are short-circuiting the click economy.
Lower traffic means fewer ad impressions, shrinking affiliate revenues, and tighter margins for independent media, creators, and commerce sites.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince added fresh context this week. A decade ago, Google crawled two pages for every one visit it sent. Now that ratio is 18:1.
For OpenAI, it’s 1,500:1. For Anthropic, a staggering 60,000:1. In short, AI firms are consuming more content than ever — but sending back barely anything.
Expert Insight
“AI crawlers are taking more than they give,” Prince said at the Axios conference in Cannes. “We’ve seen a massive inversion in the value exchange online.”
BrightEdge’s data echoes that view: while search activity rises, human visits fall.
GazeOn’s Take / Where It Could Go From Here
We may be entering a new phase of web economics — one where the engines of traffic generation are decoupled from the platforms that host original content.
Unless there’s regulatory pushback or shifts in AI search design, small and mid-tier publishers could face a slow bleed in visibility and revenue.
This won’t just hit ad budgets. It may reshape how the public finds news, products, and trusted sources online.
Reader Question
Are AI crawlers breaking the open web’s value exchange — or just evolving it? Drop your thoughts below.
About Author:
Eli Grid is a technology journalist covering the intersection of artificial intelligence, policy, and innovation. With a background in computational linguistics and over a decade of experience reporting on AI research and global tech strategy, Eli is known for his investigative features and clear, data-informed analysis. His reporting bridges the gap between technical breakthroughs and their real-world implications bringing readers timely, insightful stories from the front lines of the AI revolution. Eli’s work has been featured in leading tech outlets and cited by academic and policy institutions worldwide.
