Similarweb: since Google launched AI Overviews, the number of news searches that result in no click-throughs has grown from 56% in May 2024 to 69% in May 2025
Referrals from ChatGPT to news publishers are growing, but not enough to counter the decline in clicks resulting …
Context & Ripple Effects
The reported change adds a concrete no-click measure to an emerging publisher-distribution problem: earlier Similarweb coverage found Google's AI tools cutting publishers' organic search traffic, while publishers had already reported steep declines after the rollout of AI Overviews. Earlier Similarweb reporting on reduced organic traffic makes this a worsening engagement signal rather than an isolated metric.
Alternative AI referrals are growing, but the corpus indicates they have not offset lost search clicks. That imbalance is consistent with a TollBit analysis finding AI search engines delivered far less referral traffic than Google Search. AI search's referral-traffic shortfall remains central to the economics for news publishers.
First-order effects
- News publishers receive fewer visits from Google searches that end on the results page, reducing the audience flow available for advertising, subscriptions, and direct reader relationships.
- Google retains more of the news-search interaction within Search as AI Overviews answer queries without requiring a publisher click.
Second-order effects
- Publishers face greater pressure to diversify distribution and to assess licensing or access terms for AI systems, as growing AI referrals do not replace lost search traffic.
- The result reinforces evidence that AI summaries depress outbound engagement: a Pew-based study found lower link-clicking when AI Overviews appeared. Observed lower click rates with AI Overviews raises the stakes for publishers and search platforms over attribution and traffic sharing.
Third-order effects
- If no-click behavior continues rising, news discovery could shift from a referral-driven web model toward answer engines that use publisher material while capturing the user session themselves.
- That shift would make publisher leverage increasingly dependent on controls, commercial agreements, and direct audiences rather than search ranking alone; the pace and eventual business impact remain uncertain.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from search engines as traffic referrers to AI answer interfaces that concentrate user attention on-platform.