AI’s Growing Shadow: News Traffic Plummets, Content Creators Brace for Impact
[Your City, Your State] – We’ve observed a startling trend across the internet: news sites are experiencing a dramatic collapse in web traffic, with some seeing declines of nearly 50% since Google integrated its AI search features. While we can’t help but acknowledge a certain grim satisfaction in seeing some mainstream media outlets struggle, we are also deeply concerned about what this means for independent content creators like us.
New data reveals the severity of this shift. Of the top 50 news domains, 37 have suffered year-over-year traffic declines since the launch of Google’s AI Overviews last month. This drastic drop comes despite a major election year, which would typically boost traffic due to significant events such as the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and his election victory. We’ve seen firsthand how an election year can positively impact channel views, yet these news sites are still experiencing significant losses.
Major News Outlets Hit Hard:
- Forbes and Huffington Post each lost 40% of their traffic.
- Daily Mail.com plunged 32%.
- CNN fell 28%.
- The Wall Street Journal saw declines of 27% and 17%.
- Fox News fell 24%.
- The New York Post network, including affiliates like Decider and Page Six, saw a 12% loss, dropping from 433 million page views in June 2024 to 381 million in May.
A Google spokesperson has denied that their AI push is to blame for the cratering traffic. However, our observations and industry data strongly suggest otherwise. Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 19% of all US desktop keyword traffic overall, and a staggering 87.6% (nearly 88%) of these AI Overviews appear in position one of search results. This means that for a significant portion of searches, users are presented with an AI-generated summary at the top, potentially negating the need to click through to original news sources. This also affects paid search clicks, as AI Overviews currently remove the likelihood of getting a paid search click.
While some may celebrate the decline of what they perceive as “garbage outlets,” we are not celebrating. This trend is not confined to large news conglomerates; it’s affecting various other content websites, including those focused on pop culture, which are vital resources for our work. We believe this is a direct consequence of AI’s increasing presence in search results, and we are gravely concerned about its long-term implications.
Our biggest concern is the fundamental shift in how content is consumed and monetized. Google and other AI companies are actively “crawling” our data—our videos, our articles—and essentially “stealing” that information. They then use AI Overviews to serve this information directly to search traffic. In the near future, we anticipate that AI will not only generate these overviews but also create AI videos, running ads within them and retaining 100% of the revenue. Currently, YouTube and Google are the number one and two search engines, respectively. In the past, when someone searched for a “how-to” video on YouTube, the independent creator who produced that video would earn AdSense revenue. The looming future, as we see it, is YouTube generating AI videos from the hard work of independent creators, running ads, and keeping all the money.
This is why we are making significant changes to our business model and promoting our live streams so heavily. We believe that live streams will “probably outlast standalone videos,” as they are “more difficult to replace” by AI. We’ve done our best to maintain our audience, but we believe standalone videos will likely never achieve the viewership they once did. The internet, including YouTube and search engine results, is already saturated with what we call “AI slop”. If AI can create content itself, there’s little incentive for platforms to pay creators.
While it might seem amusing that traditional news websites are struggling, we understand that this is only the beginning. It won’t be long until AI’s impact extends to independent content creators like us. We intend to continue our work for as long as possible, hoping that our audience will continue to tune into our live streams as we navigate this evolving digital landscape.
