By Rhett Ayers Butler
Publication Date: 2026-10-02 14:31:00
In a recent post I noted that Mongabay’s evergreen content has been getting crushed in the AI chatbot era, but that our news traffic is surging.
A large part of this trend is referral traffic from Google Discover, the AI-powered recommendation engine that suggests stories on Android devices and other Google surfaces. Through the first eight months of 2026, Discover referrals climbed from 9 million to 46 million across our core news sites.
While that is a welcome development at a moment when many news outlets are reporting declining traffic, Google recently announced that it is testing a change that could be devastating to publishers.
Dubbed “Dive Deeper,” Discover would display AI-generated summaries of news articles instead of snippets that take users directly to publishers’ stories.
I expect that if Google implements this change, many niche publishers who produce exclusive content will seriously consider blocking Googlebot from their sites. If that happens, it could…