Google’s AI Overviews Are Killing Clicks And Both News Publishers and Marketers Should Be Worried

When the internet’s largest gatekeeper starts answering questions without sending anyone to the source, there are consequences. For publishers, it means collapsing traffic. For marketers, it means vanishing reach. And for the rest of us? A world of algorithmically curated truth, minus the journalism that once held it together.

Google’s AI Overviews, the AI-generated blurb at the top of search results, have been hailed by some as a time-saving tool. But for the news and marketing industries, they’ve triggered an existential crisis.

A recent study by SEO platform Authoritas found that click-through rates (CTR) for top-ranking search results plummet by up to 79% when an AI Overview is displayed. In some cases, the top organic listing becomes irrelevant, barely visible and barely clicked.

The Guardian reported that MailOnline experienced a 56% drop in desktop clicks and 48% on mobile for articles affected by AI Overviews. Meanwhile, research by Pew observed that users exposed to AI Overviews clicked on only one in every 100 searches. Without the AI summary, the click rate more than doubled to 15%.

These aren’t just signals of disruption. They’re signs of systemic disintermediation, the kind that rewires industries. As Matt MacDonald, CEO of Authoritas, put it: “publishers are effectively training the AI to replace them and seeing their audiences disappear as a result.”

Google’s original mission was to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible. But its latest iteration is doing something different – replacing the act of exploration with algorithmic conclusion. When an AI-generated answer appears at the top of the page, most users stop there. The summary becomes the story and that summary often pulls directly from journalism that no one bothers to read.

This has two consequences: publishers lose the traffic that funds original reporting, and readers lose the nuance that only journalism can provide. As Emily Bell, professor at Columbia Journalism School, warned: “We’ve reached a point where AI is no longer curating content, it’s replacing the act of reading it. That has chilling consequences for investigative journalism, local reporting, and democratic accountability.”

If your strategy involves earned media, publisher partnerships, or appearing in editorial environments, this affects you, deeply. When a Google user sees an AI summary and doesn’t click through, your brand’s name might be mentioned, but not explored. Your context is lost and the surrounding analysis, quote, or product nuance are all flattened.

Worse, with declining publisher traffic comes a flood of low-value ad inventory and diminishing trust in the very environments where brands build credibility. If no one’s reading the articles, then no one’s seeing the brand integrations. The top-funnel evaporates. This isn’t just about impressions. It’s about meaningful attention, and AI Overviews are killing it.

AI answers feel convenient because they’re concise, digestible and seemingly authoritative. But they’re also frequently inaccurate, devoid of editorial judgement and prone to omission, generalisation, or hallucination. Worse, they eliminate the act of clicking through to verify or explore the source. That means readers are trusting what a machine thinks is true, not what a journalist knows is important.

When AI becomes the middleman between reader and truth, we’re no longer consuming journalism, we’re consuming a distilled guess at it. This isn’t some hypothetical slippery slope. It’s already happening.

Zero-click searches have risen to 69% for news-related queries, according to SimilarWeb. Publishers are filing complaints with regulators over what they see as an exploitative use of their content by Google. Generative AI models are trained on journalism without consistently compensating their creators, while simultaneously stealing their traffic.

If allowed to continue unchecked, this trend leads to one outcome: a hollowed-out media landscape where fewer outlets can afford to produce real news, especially at the local or investigative level.

What Should Marketers Do?

1. Invest in owned media
   Build newsletters, podcasts, and editorial hubs that don’t rely on search engines to reach your audience.
2. Champion publisher partnerships
   Use sponsored content, co-created series, and direct advertising to support journalism that adds value.
3. Prioritise depth over reach
   AI might skim, but humans still crave substance. Build campaigns that offer more than a soundbite.
4. Audit your exposure
   If your brand relies on PR and editorial mentions, start measuring what’s actually being seen in a zero-click world.

And What Should Consumers Do?

• Click through. Read the full article.
• Seek out original sources. Don’t trust summaries.
• Support journalism, especially local and investigative.

If the click dies, so does the story – Google’s AI Overviews mark a fundamental shift in how information is consumed and how value flows in the digital economy. They are convenient for users, profitable for platforms, and catastrophic for publishers.

For marketers, this means a shrinking space for trusted media engagement. For readers, it means an increasingly thin, synthetic understanding of the world. Clicks aren’t vanity metrics, they’re the currency of attention, the mechanism that funds news, and the bridge between truth and the people who seek it. If we lose that bridge, we lose far more than traffic. We lose the truth itself.