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WWW - the last one out please turn off the lights

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/22/ai_search_starves_publishers/

he AIpocalypse is here for web sites as search referrals plunge
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Turn out the lights, the internet is over
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Thomas Claburn
Sun 22 Jun 2025 // 10:14 UTC

Google AI Overviews and other AI search services appear to be starving the hand that fed them.

Google's AI-generated summaries of web pages, officially released in May 2024, show up atop its search results pages so search users don't have to click through to the source website.

A year later, enterprise AI analytics biz BrightEdge reported that Google AI Overviews had generated more search impressions (up 49 percent), but click-throughs to the actual web sites dropped 30 percent

That means AI Overviews is leading more people to use Google Search to find answers to their queries. But those people are less likely to follow search results links that lead to the source website. Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of web sites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.

Kevin Indig, who writes about search engine optimization (SEO), marked the one-year anniversary of AI Overviews with a usability study. Based on data from the 70 individuals surveyed, he observed that when AI Overviews are absent, "outbound click rates rise to an average of 28 percent on desktop and 38 percent on mobile."

Ahrefs, an SEO site, in April said AI Overviews reduced clicks by about 35 percent.

Citing data provided by SimilarWeb (which SimilarWeb shared with El Reg, Barron's last week reported that search referrals to top US travel and tourism have fallen 20 percent year on year, while news and media sites saw search-driven traffic drop by 17 percent during that period.