That's not the case for many other crawlers, making Google an outlier among the big players.
This is a sore point for a wide range of website operators, from news websites that publish journalism to investment banks that produce investigative reports.
A July study from the Pew Research Center analyzed data from 900 U.S. adults and found that AI Overviews cut referrals nearly in half. Specifically, users clicked a link on a page with AI summaries at the top just 8 percent of the time, compared to 15 percent for search engine results pages without those summaries.
And a report in The Wall Street Journal cited a wide range of sources — including internal traffic statistics from numerous major publications like The New York Times and Business Insider — to describe industry-wide declines in website traffic that these publishers said were tied to AI summaries, leading to layoffs and strategic shifts.
In August, Liz Reid, the head of Google Search, challenged the validity and applicability of studies and reports from publishers about reduced clicks on links in search results. “Overall, Google Search's total organic website click volume has remained relatively stable over the past year,” she wrote. Reports of large declines were “often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the rollout of AI features in Search.”
Publishers are not convinced. Penske Media Corporation, owner of brands such as The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, sued Google in September over AI Overviews. The lawsuit alleges that revenue from affiliate links has fallen by more than a third in the past year, largely due to Google's oversights — a looming shortfall in a business that already has tough margins.
Penske's lawsuit specifically noted that because Google bundles traditional search engine indexing and RAG usage, the company has no choice but to allow Google to continue aggregating its articles, as completely shutting down Google search referrals would be financially fatal.
Since the early days of digital publishing, referrals have functioned in one way or another as the backbone of the Internet economy. Content could be made freely available to both human readers and crawlers, and standards were applied across the Internet to allow information to be traced back to its source and to allow that source to monetize the content to sustain itself.
