"Google's AI-generated summaries in search, called AI Overviews, turned a year old in May. Around that time, publishers began to quantify the impact AI Overviews was having on their clickthroughs from search, with some reporting 50-90% lower CTRs when an AI summary appeared. In August, Digital Content Next found AI Overviews were linked to a 25% drop in referral traffic. The future of "zero-click search" started to materialize, and it wasn't pretty."
"In the first half of this year, publishers were playing an endless game of Whack-a-Mole with AI crawlers as they tried to stop the ones scraping their sites for content used to train their models - without compensation. But on July 1, Cloudflare launched an AI bot blocking tool that allowed publishers and other website creators to block all AI crawlers, as well as have the option to implement a pay-per-crawler feature to help publishers monetize AI bot traffic."
Generative AI became integral to publishers' daily operations in 2025, influencing traffic analysis, licensing negotiations, and product development. AI-generated answers in search reduced clickthroughs, with publishers reporting 50–90% lower CTRs when AI summaries appeared and studies linking AI Overviews to a 25% fall in referral traffic. Publishers responded with diversified strategies including video, direct-to-audience efforts, AI licensing deals, crawler blocks, lawsuits, and proprietary AI products. Website operators faced persistent scraping by AI crawlers without compensation, prompting tools to block crawlers and options to monetize crawler access.
Read at Digiday
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