Chartbeat

Publishers are losing Google traffic as AI answers replace links

Publishers are getting fewer visitors from Google Search because Google now shows AI-generated answers instead of links to websites. Data from Chartbeat shared with Axios shows that Google Search traffic to news sites fell 34% in the last year. The drop is bigger for small publishers, which lost about 60% of their search referrals over two years. Medium and large publishers saw smaller drops of 47% and 22% respectively.