Media workers aren’t being replaced by AI systems so much as they are being replaced by one: Google’s gluttonous AI overviews, which summarize articles and present them to users in an easily readable digest.
But while users are wasting precious seconds with their queries, online media publications are suffering due to a huge drop in clicks. That web traffic, SEO firm found grothikaThere has been a significant decline since the arrival of Google’s AI overview.
The firm looked at Ahrefs tracking data. Web traffic on 10 major tech outlets from early 2024 to early 2026. At its peak, the media companies drove 112 million site visits per month from Google users in the US. By January this year, that number had dropped to a little under 50 million – some outlets had lost more than 90 percent of their traffic since the new feature was introduced.
Although some publications fared worse than others, none of them are thriving. Mashable performed best, losing a serious 30 percent of its web traffic between its peak and January 2026. That’s a lot, but it’s nothing compared to this wiredwhich lost 62 percent of its traffic, or even a group of outlets how to geek, The VergeAnd ZDNetEach of which lost more than 85 percent of its web traffic over a two-year period.
And the real sob story is the tech outlet digital trendsWhich increased from 8.5 million clicks per month in March 2024 to 264,861 in January 2026. It’s a stunning decline – a 97 percent drop in US web traffic from Google.
As Grothika observed, the four most affected publications combined get less monthly web traffic than the r/ChatGPT subreddit gets.
Although Grotheka believes it cannot prove causation from traffic data on its own, it theorizes that the disruption is due to three combined issues: Google’s AI overview, which came out in mid-2024; A surge in the algorithm that propels Reddit to the top of the charts; And the growing number of AI chatbot users who abandon Google altogether.
Importantly, the hardest hit came in mid-2025, when Google expanded its AI ​​overview system to cover a much broader range of questions. In July last year, the feature’s visibility peaked, with some 25 percent of all Google searches Triggering an automatic summary.
In response to an email to futurismA Google spokesperson called the Grothica analysis “fundamentally flawed”.
The spokesperson said, “It looked at a very small number of sites and failed to control for normal seasonal changes. More importantly, it did not take into account how people’s content preferences were shifting toward a variety of formats, such as podcasts and forums.” “As the technology and media landscape evolves, we’re designing our products to help people connect with the sites and creators they value.”
For the media industry, this isn’t just a small change from Google notoriously fickle Search algorithm. This represents a completely different scenario – and a paradigm shift in the media sector that leaves us all less informed.
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