Press Gazette: “The dramatic impact of Google‘s AI-written summaries on search result visibility for publishers has been revealed through exclusive new research.A Press Gazette-led investigation has found that AI-written summaries were returned for nearly a quarter of news-related search queries in mid-May in the US, with the result that organic links to publisher articles were pushed far down the page.The research suggests that if this drop in search prominence equates to an equivalent drop in search rankings it would have a “devastating” impact on publisher clickthroughs for these key search terms.Google insists that links contained in AI Overviews generate more clicks, but has declined to share any data on this. The research published today suggests that in many cases the AI Overviews contain no links at all (see examples below)…

More than half of health-related search queries generated an AI summary. Google searches account for around a third of traffic to most news websites. So widespread rollout of AI Overviews could have a dramatic impact on overall publisher traffic (and therefore ad revenue). The chart below shows the average number of pixels by which search results for various news-related search terms linking to outside sites have dropped in AI Overviews, compared to traditional organic results…”