One of the prevailing gripes in the AI era comes from website owners and publishers who bemoan recent declines in traffic, inflicted by AI apps and engines. This accelerates an existing zero-click search trend wherein expanding results and AI overviews preempt the need to click to find out more.
Google has gotten ample grief for this phenomenon over the past decade as SERPs increasingly provide more depth and Knowledge Graph content. Now, AI accelerates the trend as comprehensive answers to questions – though they’re appended by citations and relevant links – are increasingly sufficient.
The recent loss of traffic has been evident through a chorus of backlash from major publishers in the news media and other verticals. Meanwhile, pundits and pragmatists assert a “can’t beat ’em, so join ’em” narrative in learning the dark arts of AI SEO or generative engine optimization (GEO).
Either way, the zero-click trend is here to stay. Fortunately, citations are still a central part of the mix – for now anyway. Because AI engines are working against some trust issues – and doing a decent job so far – citations help ground their answers in a degree of validity. It’s like high-school math: show your work.
Key Question
All the above raises a key question: Does the elevated use of AI engines and their citations offset the effects of zero-click search? In other words, organic traffic from Google is declining per the above. But does greater ChatGPT usage – and resulting referrals and traffic – counterbalance those declines?
The answer is unsurprisingly no. SimilarWeb’s latest report, GenAI and How It’s Impacting US Publishers, shows that referrals from ChatGPT to news sites are rapidly growing. But it’s not enough to overcome the decline in Google organic traffic caused by AI-powered search results and AI Overviews.
Specifically, zero-click news searches have grown from 56 percent to 69 percent since Google launched AI overviews in May 2024. As a corollary, organic traffic to news sites has declined from 2.3 billion visits to 1.7 billion visits during the same period. That’s a drop of 600 million or 27 percent.
Meanwhile, news-based prompts and queries in ChatGPT grew 212 percent in the same time period. More importantly, referrals to news sites grew by 25 million, or 25x year-over-year. That’s explosive growth (albeit from a small base), but not even close to counteracting the above decline of 600 million.
Creative Reshuffling
A cursory way to read the above data is that Google is doing something negative for publisher traffic, while ChatGPT is offsetting it with something positive. And though that’s the message on the surface, ChatGPT isn’t necessarily a positive force in traffic for news sites or anyone else.
Though ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, that’s partly because ChatGPT itself is at earlier lifecycle stages where everything is growing from a small base. And though it’s sending a growing volume of traffic to websites, its very presence indirectly contributes to declines in organic traffic.
As for Google, none of the above is good for its business. By pushing against a classic innovator’s dilemma and disrupting itself to gain AI market share, there are consequences. Though all the above is framed in organic search, paid search inventory and performance are displaced by AI Overviews.
Google’s answer so far is mechanisms like Offerwall. Available in Google Ad Manager, it lets publishers work tools other than paid traffic generation. This includes SERP-based calls to action that drive things like micropayments or premium subscriptions. Expect to see much more reshuffling like this.
