There is a runrún that runs through digital media writings around the world. The editors look at their traffic metrics with a face of concern while they see how Google, which has been being mainly mainly to attract readers between SEO and Discover, has now become its greatest rival.
And now, a study of the Pew Research Center puts figures to what many already sensed: Google’s summaries are sweeping with a good part of web traffic. In addition, it is not a recoverable traffic, it is traffic that will never return.
Why is it important. We are facing the balance that has been holding the Internet for decades.
- Google sent traffic to the websites …
- … that, in return, created content that fed the search engine.
It was a symbiotic ecosystem: the search engine made sense by the websites, the websites received traffic from the search engine.
Now only Google wins.
When the AI Overviews26% of users directly leave their search session, compared to 16% in traditional searches. The AI becomes the final destination, not to the starting point.
The result will be paradoxical:
- Many digital media and independent websites will close due to lack of traffic.
- That will leave Google with less content for your AI summaries and to train future models.
The golden egg chicken, dead to pecks.
In figures. The numbers are devastating. Only 8% of searches with the summary of AI generate clicks to web pages, compared to 15% when Google shows only traditional results. And just 1% of users click on the sources cited within the AI summary itself.
The study tracked the online activity of 900 American adults during March 2025. More than half (58%) ran into a search that produced an automatically generated summary.
The context. The AI Overviews already appear in one in five Google searches. Long consultations, formulated as questions or written in complete phrases are more likely to activate these automatic summaries.
The sources that most quote the AI remain the usual: Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit concentrate 15% of all appointments.
Between the lines. Google faces an inevitable strategic dilemma. If it does not evolve towards smarter experiences, it runs the risk of losing relevance against perplexity, chatgpt and other competitors that give direct answers.
But this evolution generates a paradox: the company feeds on the content that others create, while its tools of eliminating economic incentives to continue creating that content.
Web editors report traffic falls from 15% to 35% since these summaries were generalized. So far there was a balance, but it is increasingly broken.
The big question. How will the web content creation ecosystem support when traditional incentives disappear? The summaries of AI need updated information to work, but are eroding the business models that make that creation possible.
Corrective measures are already beginning to appear: OpenAI has signed license agreements with various media, and Google is valuing similar formulas. But the consequences of the problem come much faster than these solutions.
- A foreseeable scenario: formulas will end up balance the balance.
- But they cannot prevent the ecosystem from being reduced, with means closing or reducing their templates.
It is the market, friend.
Yes, but. Google does not see it that way and ensures that the AI overViews “help to understand complex topics faster” and continue to “direct billions of daily clicks.” He has described PEW’s study as “methodologically defective.”
However, the trend is unanimously perceived in the industry. Google is completing its transformation: to be the great web traffic distributor to become the final destination where the information is consumed without ever leaving its domains.
It is the logical evolution of a search engine in 2025, but also the end of an era for the web ecosystem as we knew it.
In WorldOfSoftware | Google continues to redesign its search engine with AI. Your new function speaks by phone with business in your name
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