Google’s AI overviews slash website traffic 30% since May launch, publishers freaking

Google’s AI Overviews feature is dramatically reducing website traffic as users increasingly rely on AI-generated summaries instead of clicking through to source websites. Data from multiple analytics firms shows click-through rates have dropped 30-35% since the feature’s May 2024 launch, threatening the revenue model that has sustained web publishers for decades.

The big picture: AI search tools are fundamentally breaking the symbiotic relationship between search engines and content creators, with Google crawling far more pages than it refers traffic to.

• Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, revealed that Google’s ratio of pages crawled to visitors referred has skyrocketed from 2:1 ten years ago to 18:1 today.
• OpenAI’s crawler-to-referral ratio has jumped from 250:1 to 1,500:1, while Anthropic’s has exploded from 6,000:1 to 60,000:1.

Key traffic declines: Multiple industries are experiencing significant drops in search-driven traffic, according to SimilarWeb data shared with Barron’s.

• Travel and tourism sites saw search referrals fall 20% year-over-year.
• News and media sites experienced a 17% decline.
• E-commerce sites dropped 9%, finance sites fell 7%, and food/drink sites declined 7%.

The performance paradox: While AI Overviews are generating more search activity, they’re simultaneously starving the websites that provided the training data.

• BrightEdge, an enterprise AI analytics firm, reported that AI Overviews increased search impressions by 49% but reduced click-throughs by 30%.
• Kevin Indig’s usability study found that when AI Overviews are absent, “outbound click rates rise to an average of 28 percent on desktop and 38 percent on mobile.”
• AI search engines have replaced only about 10% of traditional search referral traffic, according to SimilarWeb.

Why this matters: Web publishers face a devastating revenue crisis as AI companies extract value from their content while providing minimal traffic in return.

• Lower click-through rates directly translate to reduced advertising and subscription revenues.
• This trend helps explain the wave of lawsuits publishers have filed against AI firms.
• The situation represents what The Register calls an “AIpocalypse” for websites dependent on search traffic.

What the data shows: Despite Google maintaining roughly 90% of the search market, the company is consuming the very content that made its business possible.

• Ahrefs, an SEO analytics site, found AI Overviews reduced clicks by approximately 35%.
• The consistent pattern across multiple measurement sources confirms the severity of traffic decline.
• AI crawlers have become a significant burden for websites, which bear the cost of serving content to AI companies for their commercial services.