AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in online news audiences: report 

UK news publishers have issued a warning over the impact of Google's AI-generated search summaries, saying they are already seeing steep declines in referral traffic that threaten the financial viability of independent journalism.

According to The Guardian, a new study by analytics firm Authoritas found that "a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79 percent of its traffic for that query" when an AI Overview is shown above the link. A separate month-long analysis by the Pew Research Center found that users "only clicked a link under an AI summary once every 100 times".

AI summaries can give users all the information they seek without ever clicking through to the original source of the content. Meanwhile, search result links are pushed further down the page, lowering the number of users that find them.

The study also found that links to YouTube – owned by Google's parent company Alphabet – were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK's competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews.

While AI Overviews currently appear in only a portion of searches, some publishers say the effects are already measurable. Carly Steven, an executive at MailOnline, said the site was seeing a "large drop in clicks from search results featuring an AI summary," with clickthrough rates falling by 56.1 percent on the desktop site and 48.2 percent on mobiles.

The legal complaint, filed with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), is a joint effort by the tech accountability group Foxglove, the Independent Publishers Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web.

Owen Meredith, chief executive of the News Media Association, accused Google of attempting to trap users in a "walled garden" by "taking and monetising valuable content – including news – created by the hard work of others". He warned that the current situation was "entirely unsustainable and will ultimately result in the death of quality information online".

Rosa Curling, director of Foxglove, described the practice as deeply damaging. "It would be bad enough if Google were simply stealing journalists' work and passing it off as their own," she said. "But worse still, they are using this work to fuel their own tools and profits, while making it harder for media outlets to reach the readers they rely on to sustain their work."

Google has dismissed the findings as "inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions and analysis," arguing that the studies relied on outdated and unrepresentative search data. "We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day," a Google spokesperson said, "and we have not seen dramatic drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested."

The CMA has yet to respond publicly to the complaint. The case comes amid intensifying global scrutiny of how dominant tech platforms handle third-party content, and whether generative AI technologies risk further destabilising the already fragile economics of online journalism.