A Google search for “Burnham social care” on July 30 surfaced something new at the top of the page: BBC, Guardian and Caring Times articles stacked in a Top Stories carousel directly inside an AI Overview, according to Press Gazette.

The placement is part of a broader shift in how Google handles breaking news in AI-generated search results—and it creates a new dilemma for publishers weighing whether to opt out of Google’s AI features.

Google began rolling out the embedded Top Stories carousel in June. When it appears, it replaces the standalone Top Stories box that traditionally sits below an AI Overview, putting publisher links closer to the top of the page instead of forcing users to scroll through AI-generated text to find them.

The format is already showing up at meaningful scale.

Data from news SEO firm Newzdash shows that 15.5% of trending-news searches in the US that triggered Top Stories displayed the module within an AI Overview rather than in its traditional position.

The analysis covered more than 17 million Top Stories appearances across 40-plus countries during the 30 days ending July 28. So far, Newzdash has observed the embedded format only in the US and UK.

Entertainment was the category most likely to trigger the placement, accounting for 35.1% of cases in the US and 31.5% in the UK World news and sports followed, with sports appearing more often in the UK than in the US.

Newzdash founder John Shehata described the change as a “double-edged sword.” Google has said it wants to make links more prominent in its AI search experiences, and embedding the full Top Stories carousel does exactly that.

“We do not yet have comparative clickthrough data, but it should create a stronger opportunity for clicks than pushing Top Stories further down the page,” Shehata said.

But the new placement comes with a catch: Publishers may have to accept AI-generated summaries of their content to qualify for it.

Breaking news was once relatively insulated from Google’s AI answers. That protection is fading. Nearly half of Google search results pages now carry an AI Overview, according to Semrush’s tracker, putting news publishers increasingly inside the AI-generated search experience.

Google recently added Search Console controls allowing publishers to exclude their content from AI Overviews and AI Mode. The UK rollout followed a ruling by the Competition and Markets Authority.

Newzdash found that Top Stories appeared either inside an AI Overview or as a standalone module — never both. That means publishers that opt out of Google’s generative AI features could lose access to the embedded placement, with no guarantee that Google will show the standalone Top Stories module elsewhere on the page.

Shehata said publishers should distinguish between two different Google controls.

Blocking Google-Extended in robots.txt restricts the use of content for model training and grounding and should not affect a publisher’s eligibility for Top Stories. The Search Console exclusion is different: It determines whether a publisher’s links can appear in Google’s AI features at all.

The trade-off lands amid a growing debate over whether publishers should block their content from AI search. Opting out can keep a publisher’s content from being summarized by Google, but it may also remove the publisher from one of the most prominent referral opportunities Google has introduced in years.

And in an AI search environment where being cited by name increasingly matters, the embedded Top Stories carousel is more than a technical change. It is a new strategic choice for news publishers: accept a place inside Google’s AI experience, or risk disappearing from one of its most visible news placements.

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Nine Entertainment, Australia’s largest locally owned media company, will cut around 30 newsroom jobs at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, blaming what its publishing chief called an “extreme state of disruption” caused by AI.

Tory Maguire, Nine’s managing director of publishing, delivered the news to staff on Tuesday, according to reporting from The Guardian. The reductions will come through a mix of voluntary and targeted redundancies. Maguire framed the move as an evolution rather than a straight cost cut, though financial pressure is evident.

“In the last 12 months, as we have discussed many, many times at the publishing town halls, we are in an extreme state of disruption because of AI,” she told staff.

Maguire put AI ahead of every prior shock the industry has absorbed. The internet and social media, she said, did not disrupt the business as much as AI is now.

The numbers behind that claim are becoming clearer. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026 found 10% of news consumers worldwide now use AI chatbots to get their news, rising to 16% among people under 35. Meanwhile, fewer readers are clicking through from search engines, because Google increasingly answers queries with its own AI summaries instead of sending traffic to publishers.

Australian outlets face a compounding problem. Research from the University of Sydney found local journalism was largely invisible in AI-generated news summaries produced by Microsoft Copilot, which overwhelmingly surfaced US and European sources instead.

Nine’s own financials reflect the squeeze. Digital subscription revenue fell 6% last year, and Maguire said reader revenue stalled for the first time in three years, with the division under enormous pressure partly due to the popularity of AI search results. The company says it plans to retrain existing staff and hire for what it describes as digital-first, reader-savvy, data-informed roles.

The Australian Financial Review is exempt from this pressure. Maguire credited its head start, pointing to a paywall it has run since 2007, as evidence the AFR is further along in adapting than the two legacy mastheads.

This is not an isolated incident. Two years ago Nine cut 200 jobs, including 90 from the mastheads and the AFR, and in 2024 chief executive Matt Stanton warned of $100m in cuts over two years. That earlier round, tied to Meta abandoning the news media bargaining code, triggered industrial action and a wave of senior departures. The merger with Fairfax Media in 2018 shed another 144 roles.

For newsrooms elsewhere, the pattern here is worth watching closely. Publishers are now naming AI not as a future risk but as the immediate cause of headcount decisions, and the referral economy that funded much of digital journalism is thinning fast.

Whether retraining and new digital roles can offset the loss of search and social traffic is the open question. Nine is betting they can. The next set of subscription numbers will show whether that bet is paying off.

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Organic Google Search referrals to eight major UK publishing groups fell 7.1% between the first and second quarters of 2025. If that holds, the volume of pageviews Google sends to these publishers will be cut in half by the third quarter of 2027.

That projection comes from the Association of Online Publishers’ new Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study, detailed by Richard Reeves in Press Gazette. The AOP commissioned DJB Strategies to analyze six months of traffic across 10.8 billion pageviews, roughly 80% of the participants’ total after long-tail URLs were stripped out, alongside an Ipsos survey of consumer AI use.

The study revealed the decline even as Google reported that its Search revenue grew 12% and expanded AI Overviews, as the company turns Search from a route to content into a destination that answers queries directly. With Google pushing its zero-click AI Mode toward the center of the search experience, the study’s authors expect the drop to speed up rather than level off.

News publishers held up better than most, averaging a quarterly decline of around 5%, against 18% for the consumer and B2B segment. The study attributes that to tighter guardrails on news inside AI Overviews compared with the evergreen content that AI aggregates easily. Split by topic, news actually ticked up 2%. Sports, travel and health & wellness gained 37%, 22% and 7% respectively, while technology, finance & business and politics fared worst, falling 28%, 23% and 7%.

Guide and how-to content lost more than 20% of its Google referrals, exactly the kind of query a reader gets from an AI answer instead of clicking through. Content carrying an explicit point of view resisted substitution best. Opinion and commentary referrals rose 4%, interviews rose 1%, and product reviews stayed roughly flat.

The catch is that reportage, the largest single content category, accounted for more traffic than everything else combined and still slipped 4%. The study suggests finding ways to inject reportage with a more distinctly human voice, which lines up with the broader argument that authority is becoming the new speed as generic information retrieval moves to the machines.

Sites funded largely by high-volume programmatic advertising rely the most on transient search traffic and have the least cushion. Reader-funded operations, however, can absorb the shock.

The study’s warning is blunt: don’t chase falling traffic by pumping out more URLs in the hardest-hit categories. That only dilutes views-per-page and accelerates the losses. The volume game built on basic information retrieval is ending, and Google is the one turning out the lights. The publishers who survive will be the ones producing work an AI answer can’t cleanly replace.

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Germany has become the first country to explicitly classify AI search features, such as Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity’s answers, as media products subject to national media law, according to Reuters. 

The country’s Commission for Licensing and Supervision, which represents Germany’s 14 state media authorities, has argued that AI summaries and chatbot answers go beyond aggregating existing information as they create new outputs that reflect the providers’ own systems. 

This follows a separate June 2026 court case in which a Munich court found Google could be held directly liable for inaccurate information produced by its AI Overview feature, according to the German newspaper publishers’ association BDZV.

Germany’s media regulator said AI search tools fall outside the European Union’s usual platform liability protections because they are not merely hosting third-party content but curating their own responses. The regulator also said Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity’s chatbot answers can shape what news audiences see, raising concerns about publishers’ visibility and reach.  

As a result, the services provided by AI search features are therefore subject to German regulations aimed at protecting media plurality.

The decision could give regulators and publishers worldwide a new foothold in their push to hold AI companies accountable for how generated answers reshape the news ecosystem. It also weakens one of the key defenses used by technology platforms, which claim only to be intermediaries organizing information created by others. 

The case may also become a blueprint for other European regulators, which have intensified investigations into major technology companies over competition, privacy and online safety concerns in recent years. 

Google intends to appeal the decision, with a spokesperson characterizing the classification as a failure “to recognize how people’s preferences when searching for information and the information ecosystem are changing.”

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Google’s AI-generated search summaries are frontlining details about the recent suicide of a public figure at the top of search results, raising concerns that AI products are amplifying sensitive information that traditional news guidelines advise against publicizing. 

This incident highlights a growing challenge for AI search products as they determine not only what information is relevant, but what deserves emphasis. 

Nicola Agius, CEO of the newsbranch Reach, was the first to identify the issue on June 30 after seeing an Instagram post stating that the brother of Caroline Flack, a former presenter for the U.K. reality show Love Island, had died. Agius searched for “Caroline Flack brother” on Google to verify the news.

Not only did Google’s AI Overview confirm his death, Agius shared that it prominently stated that he had died by suicide, also including the location, method and the effect on his body. The summary also detailed how he was found. 

The Media Copilot was able to replicate the result on July 3. Using the same search query, Google’s AI Overview stated the method of death alongside all facts detailed above. The search was conducted by a reporter in Europe. Results from searches in the United States, however, did not always show the details of his death. 

The Media Copilot also found that even when Google’s AI Overview does not initially surface details of a suicide, simple follow-up prompts can elicit extensive information, including the method, location, police reports, descriptions of the scene and other sensitive information. 

The content displayed by Google’s AI Overview originated in publisher reporting, but they were given greater prominence in the AI-generated summary than in the source articles themselves. In some cases, the information was even removed from the original reporting altogether. One publication cited by Google for the cause of death no longer included those details in the linked article by July 3, while other outlets continued to reference them but with less prominence. 

The Associated Press guidelines on reporting suicide urge publishers “to not go into detail on the methods used.”

“It is incredibly worrying—and disappointing—to see some press sovereign and AI overviews including references to methods of suicide,” said Lois Sparks, head of safeguarding at Mind, a mental health charity, in an interview with Press Gazette. “Not only can these AI summaries be incredibly triggering for people to see so prominently, but in some instances, there is little signposting to mental health support.”

The Media Copilot’s inquiry did trigger a support message, which stated: “If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available in the U.K. by calling the Samaritans at 116 123 or texting SHOUT to 85258. In the U.S., you can call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.”

“Broadly, AI overviews give an illusion of definitiveness,” Sparks said. “They make highly sensitive and nuanced areas seem like concrete facts. If AI overviews are covering news, then they must be regulated to the same standards of traditional media—which they are currently not.”

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Media consumption recently passed a big milestone: people now turn to social media and video networks like YouTube for news more than any other source. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, now in its 15th year, found 54% of audiences now rely on social and video platforms to get their news, putting them ahead of publisher websites at 51% and TV at 52%.

And the trust side of the ledger keeps getting worse. Just 37% of people say they trust most news most of the time, the lowest reading since Reuters started tracking it in 2015. In the United States the figure sinks to 25%. Gallup’s October 2025 poll landed in the same place, with U.S. trust in mass media at 28%, down from 31% the year before and 40% five years ago.

The natural read is that media brands matter less every year, drifting toward irrelevance as audiences scatter into feeds. AI chatbots seem to accelerate the slide. The Reuters report puts news consumption via AI chatbots at 10%, up from 7% a year ago. If brand erosion plus AI summarization is the trajectory, the long-term picture suggests publishers will eventually be reduced to information wholesalers, supplying the raw facts and quotes that someone else interprets, packages, and presents back to the reader.

That story has been the dominant framing for about two years now. But the data underneath doesn’t actually back it.

What the click pattern tells you

Most news consumption on social platforms is incidental. Posts and clips arrive between the workout tips and the gadget ads, and the Reuters report identifies a growing slice—now 12% of people and double the 2020 figure—who run into news only while they’re online for something else. That’s not really audience; it’s adjacency.

Behavior inside AI products reads very differently. Among people who click out of an AI answer, 44% do it to verify the news is correct, against 36% on search and 33% on social. Another 43% click to find out more about the source, versus 35% and 34%. Only 51% click for more detail, well below 59% on search and 60% on social.

That’s a behavioral signal worth paying attention to. Inside an interface designed to strip out bylines and erase visual brand cues, audiences are reaching back through the answer to get to the publisher who supplied it. The dominant reason isn’t curiosity. It’s verification. Readers don’t fully trust the summary, so they reach for the name they recognize to check it.

That breaks the simple “trust in news is collapsing” story. The aggregate trend is real, we don’t live in the aggregate. People can hold low trust in “the media” while continuing to rely on the specific publications they’ve read for years. The Reuters data confirms it: Overall trust fell in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed, but trust in the most widely used individual brands held its ground, with several major names sitting above the broader decline. Behavior and stated preference point at the same answer. Audiences are funneling toward names they already know.

The brand still matters. Arguably more than at any point in the last decade, because the brand is the only fixed object as the surrounding interface keeps changing.

Trust converts but not on impact

We should be realistic about the size of the audience that gets news via AI—it’s still only 10%, and just 1% call AI their main news source. But the slice is growing faster than any other channel, and it skews toward the most engaged readers. Among the biggest news lovers, 18% already use AI for news. That is the cohort every publication has been trying to win for the last decade.

The catch is that trust is not directly convertible. A reader who treats your name as a stamp of credibility inside a chatbot summary may never click. A reader who does click to verify a fact on your site likely arrives, scans, and bounces. Brand reliance at the moment of consumption often produces no measurable lift.

The conversion, however, can happen somewhere else. The reader who keeps reaching for your name to check the machine is the reader who eventually subscribes, who shares your work to a contact, who recommends the publication when a friend asks where they get their information. Reuters found that 46% of paying news consumers now cite values-based reasons for paying, rather than the specific content they’re buying. Those reasons accrue. The brand-reliance behavior happening inside AI interfaces is the leading indicator of the durable reader relationship that eventually shows up in revenue.

The practitioner work for the next 18 months is operational. To make the most of AI audiences, publishers need to build instrumentation that captures the moments when readers reach for the brand, even when the click numbers look thin. Build persuasion strategy that converts those signals into something countable.

Stop playing defense

The headline finding of the Reuters report implies a strategy for media: get on more surfaces, get on them harder, push more short-form video, and lean into the platforms that audiences actually use. Most publishers are following that script. On AI, the script has been the opposite, with many media sites blocking crawlers completely.

All of that is defense. While defense is important, if it’s your entire strategy, you will lose. The offensive posture is to fight to be the default name in your lane, the publication readers reach for when they doubt whatever the surface is showing them.

That means using social, but treating it as funnel rather than destination. Casual readers get a taste; the strategy is to convert a fraction of them into a brand relationship that survives outside the platform. It means blocking crawlers that take without permission, but pairing the block with clean, machine-readable paths for partners and licensees. It means producing the clip, but anchoring the clip to deep, comprehensive coverage that earns the reader’s return visit and, eventually, their subscription.

The creator economy points the same direction. About 27% of people now get news from creators who explicitly focus on news, and 46% from creators of any kind. Those creators score better than legacy outlets on relatability and entertainment value. They also rate lower on trust and impartiality. And the audience that watches them consumes more traditional media than the average reader, not less. Only 3% rely on creators alone. Creators introduce audiences to topics. The brands pick up the verification.

The fragmentation story is real. Audiences are scattering across more surfaces, taking news in smaller pieces, and getting more of it from formats that didn’t exist a decade ago. But the behavior underneath that fragmentation runs the other way. The more the news gets sliced up, the harder readers lean on a name they trust to tell them what’s actually true. Audiences take their news in smaller bites now, but the chef still matters.

A version of this column appears in Fast Company.

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The media industry is consumed right now with anxiety about the “zero-click” future. AI chatbots and search engines absorb content, interpret it, and deliver summaries directly to users, with the predictable result that fewer people actually visit publisher sites. This isn’t speculation. Data from Chartbeat, the analytics firm serving media companies, shows global publisher traffic from Google fell by a third last year, with smaller publications taking the biggest hit. AI clearly substitutes for content, but not uniformly.

A recent study by Define Media Group examined how Google AI Overviews have influenced traffic across content categories over the past year. Overall, organic search traffic has declined 42%, but clicks on breaking news stories have actually surged by 103%.

The reason: Google doesn’t display AI Overviews for breaking news queries. That tracks, since breaking stories involve rapidly changing and inconsistent information as reporters across multiple publications sort out what really happened from the noise of rumors, exaggerations, and outright misinformation that swirls around a news event. When a user searches for a breaking news event on Google, they typically see a Top Stories carousel instead of an Overview, a feature that’s existed for a long time.

The real reason breaking news traffic is climbing

Looking closer at the data reveals that Google Discover—the built-in news feed on most Android phones—is the primary driver of the big jump in news traffic. Google has also recently tweaked Discover in ways that apparently pushed even more news from publishers into feeds. But even setting Discover aside and examining only web traffic, news clicks are essentially flat. Clearly, breaking news is the content type most resistant to AI substitution.

This doesn’t mean publishers should pursue news alone, though. The category has other challenges, and competing on breaking news is expensive, requiring continual monitoring and staffing. Also, news without context loses its power. News publishers need to explain to their readers why the news is important to them, even if that explanation is at risk of being summarized by AI.

Furthermore, when AI summarizes content, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve “lost”—it shifts the competition to another arena: citation. As I’ve explored before, competition for presence in AI summaries is a battle worth fighting, even if the rewards shift considerably from the click-based advertising business model that is still important to the majority of media companies. Sites that are consistently cited in summaries will ultimately be the ones that define consensus, and data suggests that the share of the audience that does click through to sources, while smaller, is more intentional, meaning there’s more opportunity to turn them into loyal readers.

But the citation game is crowded. Publishers aren’t just competing with each other. They’re not even the preferred sources in many cases. A report from Semrush, the search-analytics firm, ranked the top sources most often cited in AI answers: Reddit, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia. The first publisher on the list is Forbes at No. 11, and I suspect it has a lot to do with its extensive contributor program.

That ranking isn’t the complete picture—other studies, like this one from Muck Rack, do show that AI search engines favor journalistic content over brand-created or social content. At the same time, AI draws answers from a wide range of sites it considers authoritative, not solely from news publishers.

How publishers can build a strategy from these signals

From these data points—news is a moat, AI favors journalism but casts a wider net, and explanatory content is the battleground—a strategy starts to take shape.

The Semrush study found that AI heavily favors citing LinkedIn content. The reason, per the study’s authors: LinkedIn content, especially the longer articles native to the platform, tends to be clearly framed, structurally obvious, and substantial in length (between 500 and 2,000 words).

If AI rewards structured explanatory writing on LinkedIn, those same qualities likely boost explanatory journalism published elsewhere. The Muck Rack data says journalism makes up about a quarter of AI citations, but it also shows that more than half of citations are from the last 12 months and that the highest citation rate is in the first seven days. Define, meanwhile, says breaking news is up while evergreen content has taken a 35% hit.

Together, that evidence points to a specific kind of publisher explainer: not static archive content, but fresh, tightly structured explanatory journalism that accompanies the news.

Now the outline of an AI-resilient news operation comes into focus. Publishers should still invest in breaking news because it remains defensible and difficult for AI to compress into a zero-click summary. But they should pair that with explainers that are updated quickly, tied closely to live topics, and written in a format that is easy for both humans and machines to parse. What’s most exposed is the generic evergreen article that works neither as essential live reporting nor as especially useful source material for AI answers.

AI, then, hasn’t made journalism irrelevant. It’s made its value more precise. Breaking news still commands attention because platforms are cautious about compressing fast-moving events into a single summary. And when the news settles, the publishers that still matter are the ones that can turn their reporting into clear, timely explanations and analysis. That’s where the next fight for authority will be fought.

A version of this column appears in Fast Company.

The post Breaking news is the one content type AI can’t replace appeared first on The Media Copilot.

The evidence that AI is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape keeps mounting. A recent report from Growtika, a self-described SEO and AI search agency, analyzed data from the search analytics platform Ahrefs and found that traffic to many tech media sites has dropped considerably over the past couple of years.

The numbers are striking. Digital Trends fell 97%, ZDNet 90%, and The Verge 85%. Even publications that appeared more durable took significant hits—Mashable was down 30% and CNET 47% (both Ziff-Davis properties). Some of these reductions are no doubt exaggerated—Growtika compared each publication’s peak month with traffic in January 2026, which doesn’t account for seasonal reductions—yet no one’s disputing the overall trend, or who’s to blame: AI.

On the surface, those numbers paint a grim picture of the floor collapsing under the media industry as a whole. But that’s overly simplistic, and it fails to take into account that publishers have seen this trend for years, and many have been adapting around it. Consider The Verge as an example: Not only did it sound the alarm early about AI’s potential to make website content irrelevant, but it also introduced a paywall in late 2024, part of a larger, four-point strategy. Traffic decline, in other words, doesn’t have to mean business decline.

The authority moat

What The Verge illustrates goes beyond traffic resilience. In the AI era, having a strong brand with a loyal audience is a genuine strategic asset. The publication has been synonymous with tech news, commentary, and analysis since its debut in 2011. Many tech brands choose to break their news there. That credibility has influence in what appears in AI answers, which tend to favor journalistic content above other types—something a recent Gartner report on the communications industry made clear.

AI is easy to cast as a traffic destroyer, but there’s another way to read it: as an audience filter. The people who find your brand through an AI summary are clearly deeply engaged. That makes them probably the most willing to pay for your content, and The Verge has given them that opportunity.

But The Verge has had a strong brand for 15 years. The audience is clear and already engaged. Other publications aren’t so fortunate, and the Growtika data should push them to take a harder look at their brand, their audience, and the actual business they’re running. With AI now fully in the picture as the ultimate information synthesizer, publishers have to understand what they’re layering on top of that information that only they—specifically, the humans that work for them—can provide.

Journalism has always been a storytelling act, and audiences are the listeners. They will seek out publications and writers with voices that resonate with them, AI or no AI. Content with lower storytelling potential, by contrast, has less value and is easily substituted by AI. The practical implication: lean into analysis, opinion, and scoops. Aggregated news (i.e. stuff broken elsewhere, or broad announcements) is less valuable, though with a caveat: A publication that skips “big” stories on its beat risks looking lightweight. But for that to be worthwhile, there are two requirements: a clear sense of what the beat actually is, and the discipline to make every piece of coverage a showcase for that publication’s unique value.

Going narrow

That dynamic tilts the playing field toward smaller publications and independent voices, and the evidence is already visible. Substack reached 5 million paid subscriptions last year, and competitor Beehiiv—where many journalists from places like The Verge and CNN have landed—is on track to double its revenue this year to $50 million.

Still, the Growtika data isn’t entirely a story of small beating large. Some numbers in the report suggest that larger organizations with strong internet domains still have resilience. Mashable and CNET are both Ziff publications, and having spent time at the company twice, I’d say Ziff has a legitimate edge when it comes to SEO. Larger outlets also have resources to quickly spin up formats that audiences are gravitating towards, such as vertical videos.

But those resources won’t hold if the underlying audience work hasn’t been done. For many publications, especially those that built their identity in the 2010s, that means narrowing focus. It also means adapting or even pivoting toward a new model. The rise of media events is telling: research from Vendelux, an event intelligence company, reported that 23% of publishers received a “large or very large portion” of revenue from events in Q1 2025, up from 8% in Q1 2024.

Chasing the wrong metrics

So the real lesson of the great traffic drop of 2026 isn’t that AI is consuming the media industry. It’s that traffic is losing its relevance as a success metric. Brands that have built businesses around things that aren’t just “articles”—such as subscriptions, newsletters, podcasts, and events—can still succeed, though with a somewhat altered definition of success. In almost all cases, the audience is smaller but more engaged in a way that’s measurable and monetizable.

For those that haven’t had that reckoning, however, the runway is getting shorter by the day. When all of the metrics around how you measure the success of your media business are falling, that’s a strong indicator you’re in the wrong business. There’s no more time to put off the hard questions about your audience, the value you bring, and how to connect those two in ways that can grow.

In other words, it’s time to panic.

The post AI is killing web traffic. The publishers who thrive already saw it coming appeared first on The Media Copilot.

For years, publishers have lived between two business models: subscriptions and advertising. Now AI is putting pressure on both. In this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal speaks with Colin Jeavons, founder and chairman of Nomix Group, to unpack what happens to the business of media when answer engines, agents, and AI-powered discovery tools begin to sit between audiences and publishers.

Listen or watch:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Drawing on decades of experience across publishing, search, and commerce technology, Jeavons argues that the biggest disruption is not simply AI summarization. It is the accelerating collapse of the old CPM-based advertising economy. As content explodes across social platforms, creator ecosystems, and AI-generated media, the supply of content keeps rising while the pool of ad dollars does not. That imbalance, he says, is forcing a reset.

At the same time, Jeavons sees a countertrend emerging: trust is becoming more valuable, not less. As audiences face a growing flood of low quality or machine generated information, publishers with expertise, authority, and niche value may find new strength in paid models, premium journalism, and smarter commerce strategies. The conversation explores what that means for newsrooms, review sites, AI discovery, shopping behavior, and the broader future of digital publishing.

Why this matters

AI is no longer just a tool layered onto the internet. It is increasingly becoming the interface through which people search, shop, compare, and decide. That has major implications for publishers whose businesses were built around traffic, clicks, and ad impressions. If AI answers reduce referrals and reshape consumer behavior, media companies may need to rethink not only distribution, but the economics behind their work.

This conversation looks past the hype cycle and gets into the harder question: what actually replaces the business models that no longer hold. Jeavons makes the case that quality journalism, expert reviews, and trusted vertical content are not disappearing. But the publishers that survive will likely be the ones that adapt quickly, invest in trust, and stop relying on scale for scale’s sake. It is a timely conversation for anyone thinking seriously about media, commerce, and the future of the open web.

What we cover

• Why Colin Jeavons believes 2026 is a turning point for media and AI

• The long shift from print and early web publishing to answer engines and agents

• Why the ad supported model is under more pressure than ever

• How AI generated content and user generated content are flooding the digital economy

• Why trust may become one of the most valuable products publishers can sell

• The future of review sites, affiliate commerce, and consumer buying behavior

• Why Jeavons believes premium journalism can regain value

• The case for micropayments and why publishers may have been too early with paywalls

• Why Google may resist making AI mode the default

• What AI shopping engines could mean for discovery, conversion, and revenue

• The broader societal risks and opportunities AI creates beyond publishing

About the show

To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the freshly updated Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube?  Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the YouTube channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

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The numbers are in, and they’re bad. A new analysis of web traffic to 10 major tech and media outlets finds that Google search referrals have collapsed since the company rolled out AI Overviews — the summaries that now appear above traditional search results and answer user queries without requiring a click.

SEO firm Growtika tracked Ahrefs data from early 2024 to January 2026. At their peak, the ten outlets combined received 112 million monthly visits from US Google users. By January of this year, that number had fallen to just under 50 million — a drop of more than 55 percent industry-wide.

For some outlets, the decline is nothing short of catastrophic.

Digital Trends went from 8.5 million clicks per month in March 2024 to 264,861 in January 2026 — a 97 percent collapse. The Verge, HowToGeek, and ZDNet each lost more than 85 percent of their Google-referred traffic over the same period. Wired lost 62 percent. Even Mashable, the analysis’s best performer, shed 30 percent of its traffic.

Growtika’s analysis notes that the four worst-hit publications now receive less combined monthly web traffic than the r/ChatGPT subreddit.

What’s driving it

The firm identifies three compounding factors: the rollout of Google AI Overviews beginning in mid-2024; algorithm changes that boosted Reddit in search rankings; and the growing number of users who skip Google entirely in favor of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The steepest declines came in mid-2025, when Google significantly expanded the range of queries that trigger an automatic AI summary. By July of last year, roughly 25 percent of all Google searches generated an AI Overview — meaning a quarter of all searches were being answered without a click.

Google pushed back on the analysis in a statement to Futurism, calling it “fundamentally flawed” for examining too small a sample and failing to account for seasonal traffic variation. The company also cited shifting audience preferences toward podcasts and forums. That defense will ring hollow for publishers whose traffic data tells a different story.

What it means for newsrooms

For journalists and editors focused on AI’s impact on journalism, the traffic story is often framed as a future threat. This data suggests it is a present reality.

Publishers built audience development strategies around search-optimized evergreen content — explainers, how-tos, reference pieces — that now trigger AI Overviews instead of clicks. That content, which represented a reliable traffic baseline for many outlets, has been effectively nationalized by Google’s summary layer.

The outlets hit hardest are tech-focused publications — the same ones most likely to have invested heavily in SEO-optimized evergreen content. News organizations with strong breaking news operations may have more protection, since real-time journalism still generates “Top Stories” placement that AI summaries can’t fully replicate.

But the broader lesson is stark: the deal that sustained digital media for a decade — produce content, get traffic from Google, sell ads against that traffic — is deteriorating faster than most newsroom business models have adapted to account for it.

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