Google says AI is “driving more queries and higher quality clicks.” Publishers say AI is taking their clicks away. Both are telling the truth, because AI search is changing what a visit is worth. Many leaders still count the free visits a site gets from search results, known as organic traffic, as one flat number.
Google’s upbeat line comes from Liz Reid, its head of Search, who wrote it in August 2025. She added that Google sends “billions of clicks to the web every day.” Search now shows AI-written summaries, called AI Overviews, that can appear above the results. Reid described them as tools that let people ask longer, more complex questions and click through only when they need real depth. The company is building Search around fewer but more meaningful clicks.
Publishers see the cost. The Guardian’s July 2025 investigation found that publishers ranked first in search results lost up to 79% of their clicks when an AI Overview appeared above them. A report based on data from Similarweb, a web analytics firm, found that 37 of the top 50 US news sites had lost traffic since AI Overviews launched.
The losses fall hardest on generic pages that a summary can easily cover. Digital Content Next, a trade group for publishers, published an analysis finding that AI Overviews often keep people on the search page, especially for factual or informational searches. The same Similarweb data showed that by May 2025, 69% of searches ended without a click to any outside site. Google wins when users stay. A website wins only if they click.
AI Mode, a version of Search the company began testing in March 2025, goes further. It drops the list of links entirely and gives a full-page AI summary with a few cited sources.
Organic search used to be a free traffic faucet. Now the price of a visit differs from site to site, so a strategy built on averages will fail. Only clear value earns the click, and the clicks that come depend more on a site’s authority and the trust it has earned. When an AI summary spotlights only a few sources, being one of them may now be worth more than the top spot in the old list of links.
