By Joe Wilkins
Publication Date: 2026-03-07 11:45:00
Media workers aren’t so much being replaced by AI systems as fed to one: Google’s gluttonous AI Overviews, which summarize articles and present them to users in one easy-to-read digest.
But while users might be shaving precious seconds from their queries, online media publications are being roiled by the massive drop-off in clicks. That web traffic, SEO firm Growtika found, has dropped off significantly following the advent of Google’s AI Overviews.
The firm looked at data from Ahrefs tracking web traffic to 10 major tech outlets from early 2024 to early 2026. At their peak, the media companies brought in 112 million site visits per month from Google users in the US. By January of this year, that number was down to a little under 50 million — with some outlets losing over 90 percent of their traffic since the new feature…
