Report: AI Overviews are crushing small publishers, as Google search traffic drops 60%

I’ve recently explored the catastrophic impact AI Overviews in Google search have on publishers. The report was based on data available at the time, and the situation looked bleak to say the least. Now, we’ve got another report with even fresher data that shows an even bigger troubles for publishers.

A recent report conducted by Chartbeat and published by Axios explores how hard publishers of all sizes were hit by the ongoing AI revolution in Google search. As expected, small publishers (sites with 1,000-10,000 daily page views) saw the steepest drop. Their referral traffic from Google declined by 60% over the past two years.

Medium-sized publishers (sites with 10,000-100,000 daily page views) experienced a 47% decline in traditional search referral traffic over the same period. Even large publishers (more than 100,000 daily page views) had a 22% decline in traditional search referrals.

Overall, page views from Google Search referrals fell 34% from December 2024 to December 2025. Even Google Discover, which is seen by some publishers as a potential remedy to declining traffic caused by AI Overviews in traditional search, produced 15% less page views for publishers over the past year.

Naturally, some publishers tried to adapt, so they started optimizing their websites for AI chatbots, hoping that if AI takes away visits in one place, it will level it up in another. Unfortunately, Chartbeat’s report shows that referrals from chatbots account for less than 1% of all publisher page views. And even that is an increase of more that 200% from December 2024 to December 2025.

To make matters worse, the little traffic publishers are getting from AI chatbots is mostly worthless. Users coming to actual websites from chatbots usually go there just to fact-check notoriously inaccurate AI-generated summaries, without engaging with the website’s content in any meaningful way.

However, there are ways for publishers to weather the storm, but those likely don’t involve optimizing for Google search and AI chatbots. The report shows that overall traffic across all global publishers fell by just 6%. That means publishers are finding new ways to attract readers, outside of traditional web search.

Larger publishers are now optimizing for email newsletters and direct traffic. And the marginal decline in overall traffic shows that the new methods are working.

But audience building is a Herculean task when you don’t have an established audience. And smaller publishers without time and resources for attracting a larger crowd of dedicated followers are already being left behind.

Source: Axios