Key Takeaways
- AI tools are significantly impacting publisher traffic, with AI bots driving much less referral traffic than traditional search.
- Content scraping by AI bots is increasing, and methods to block them are often ineffective.
- Google’s AI Overviews are appearing more frequently, potentially reducing clicks to original publisher sites.
- Even when AI cites sources, links provided can be broken or lead to non-existent pages.
- Deals between AI companies and publishers show some traffic gains, but the overall numbers remain small.
- Independent publishers are particularly hard-hit by these AI-driven changes in traffic.
It’s been a year since Google introduced AI Overviews, marking another step in how AI is reshaping the landscape for publishers, platforms, and audiences. The spread of tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity is having a noticeable effect on website traffic and content control.
AI bots are sending dramatically less traffic to publishers compared to traditional Google search—about 95.7% less on average. This is according to a February report from Tollbit, an analytics firm. While AI search engines refer users back to publishers more often than chatbots, they still generate 91% fewer referrals than top Google search results.
Publishers are particularly worried about how Google’s AI Overviews might replace or dilute the search traffic they heavily depend on. A Semrush study found that by March 2025, over 13% of all search queries triggered these AI Overviews, up from about 6.5% in January 2025.
Industries like science, health, and social topics saw the biggest jump in AI Overviews, likely due to their information-rich nature. Meanwhile, software company Ahrefs analyzed keywords and found that AI Overviews in search results were linked to a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page.
Adding to the challenge, even when AI tools cite their sources, the links don’t always work. A Tow Center for Digital Journalism report discovered that over half of responses from Google’s Gemini and Grok 3 cited fabricated or broken URLs.
A project from Northwestern University, Generative AI in the Newsroom, also noted that news sites received only a tiny fraction of traffic from ChatGPT (3.2%) and Perplexity (7.4%) in March 2025.
The problem of AI crawlers scraping publisher content for free is also getting worse. According to Tollbit’s report, scrapes per website doubled from Q3 to Q4 in 2024, and scrapes per page more than tripled. ChatGPT, Meta, and Perplexity were among the top scrapers.
Publishers use “robots.txt” files to tell web crawlers not to access their sites, but this isn’t always effective. Tollbit found that AI bot scrapes bypassing these instructions grew by over 40% between Q3 and Q4 2024. For sites with consistent bot-blocking, average scrapes per website still rose by over 61% in that period.
Lawsuits from publishers like The New York Times and Ziff Davis have shed light on the scale of this scraping. Ziff Davis claims its domains accounted for nearly 170,000 documents in one training dataset for OpenAI’s GPT-2 model. The New York Times lawsuit alleges its content is heavily represented in AI training data.
Further complicating matters, Google can still use publisher content to train its search-related AI features, like AI Overviews, even if publishers opt out of AI training, as revealed in testimony reported by Bloomberg.
Some publishers striking deals with AI companies are seeing modest increases in referral traffic. For instance, as Digiday reported, referrals from ChatGPT to The Atlantic’s site rose over 80% after they signed a deal with OpenAI.
However, the overall traffic from these partnerships isn’t yet substantial. The Generative AI in Newsroom report found that OpenAI’s partner sites didn’t get significantly more traffic than non-partners. Chartbeat data showed ChatGPT referrals grew to 5.3 million page views by April 2025 across many publishers, but this averages out to only about 1,400 page views per publisher. Perplexity referrals are even lower.
Independent publishers seem to be feeling the pinch most acutely. Several have reported significant traffic drops since the expansion of AI tools. World History Encyclopedia, for example, saw traffic fall 25% after appearing in AI Overviews. About 25 independent publishers told Bloomberg their traffic plummeted, with one site owner seeing Google traffic fall over 70%.
