Google AI Overviews are crushing web traffic for publishers.
Launched in May 2024, Google’s AI-generated page summaries show up on search results and cut down the need to click through to the original sites. A year in, this is tanking referral traffic hard.
BrightEdge reports a 49% spike in AI Overview impressions but a 30% drop in clicks to source websites. That’s more eyeballs on Google but fewer visitors for the sites that power its AI. 
SEO expert Kevin Indig’s usability study found click rates jump to 28% on desktop and 38% on mobile when AI Overviews aren’t shown. Meanwhile, SEO firm Ahrefs said in April clicks dropped about 35% thanks to AI Overviews.
SimilarWeb data, cited by Barron’s, shows search referrals tanking across US sectors: travel down 20%, media -17%, e-commerce -9%, finance and food -7%, lifestyle -5%. AI search replaces only about 10% of these lost referrals.
Publishers’ cash flow is bleeding as visits drop, even though AI-driven search use grows. This helps explain the multiple lawsuits filed against AI companies over web content use.
At an Axios event, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince revealed AI crawlers are overloading sites.
Prince stated:
Ten years ago, Google’s average ratio of pages crawled to visitors referred was 2:1. Six months ago, that ratio had increased to 6:1. Today, according to the Prince, it’s 18:1.
Prince pointed out AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic scrape way more pages per visitor—OpenAI’s ratio shot from 250:1 to 1,500:1, Anthropic’s went from 6,000:1 to 60,000:1.
Websites incur rising costs serving AI crawlers while traffic and revenue from those sites falter.
Despite chatter about AI challengers, Google still controls 90% of search, but it’s hoarding the content that once fueled its success.
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cloudflare didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
