By
Stuart Kerr, Technology Correspondent, LiveAIWire
Since its broader rollout earlier in 2025, Google’s AI Mode has
fundamentally changed the economics of online publishing. Once an
experimental feature visible only to Google One subscribers in Search Labs,
AI Mode now powers zero-click answers across millions of searches daily. The
interface places an AI-generated summary at the top of results, drawing on
multiple sources to produce a synthesised response, then presenting links to
those sources in a secondary position that fewer users reach. For news
publishers who have spent years optimising for organic search traffic, the
implications are significant and, for many, alarming.
The data emerging from the first months of full rollout reflects a
consistent pattern. According to a Press Gazette study cited by multiple
digital media analysts, news websites have seen click-through rates fall by
as much as 47 percent on queries where AI Mode activates. A Search
Engine Land analysis found average CTR declines of 38 percent
across retail and informational keywords within a month of AI Mode’s wider
deployment. Even branded queries, searches that include a specific
publisher’s name, are increasingly returning AI summaries as the primary
result rather than direct links to the publisher’s website.
The Zero-Click Problem in Detail
The zero-click phenomenon is not new. Featured snippets and
Knowledge Panels have been extracting answers from publisher pages for years
without sending the user to the source. What AI Mode changes is the scale and
sophistication of that extraction. Where a featured snippet typically
returned a single excerpt, AI Mode synthesises multiple sources into a
coherent narrative response. The user may receive information drawn from four
or five different publishers without visiting any of them. Each publisher
contributed to the answer; none captured the visit.
For news organisations, the economic damage extends beyond lost
page views. Advertisers pay for verified impressions and engagement data tied
to specific publisher environments. When a reader receives news-derived
information through a Google AI interface rather than a publisher’s website,
the advertising value that would have been generated by that engagement
evaporates. The publisher bears the cost of the journalism but captures none
of the commercial return from its distribution through AI Mode. Some media
executives have described this as a structural subsidy to Google, where the
search giant’s AI products are effectively funded by publisher investment in
original reporting.
What This Means for SEO Strategy
For publishers and content creators who have built traffic
strategies around organic search, the arrival of AI Mode requires a
fundamental reassessment of what search engine optimisation means. The
traditional playbook, optimise for keywords, build topical authority, earn
high-quality backlinks, still has value, but the end goal has changed. The
question is no longer primarily how to rank on page one. It is how to be
cited within the AI-generated response that appears above page
one.
Being cited in AI Mode responses appears to favour sources that
demonstrate clear expertise, original reporting, and consistent accuracy.
Content that aggregates information already available elsewhere performs
poorly against content that provides primary analysis, direct quotes from
relevant experts, or original data. This represents a genuine alignment
between Google’s stated E-E-A-T guidelines and the practical behaviour of AI
Mode citations, though the overlap is imperfect and the selection criteria
are not fully transparent. A Reuters
analysis of the rollout period noted that publisher losses were
concentrated in informational and aggregator content, while sites with strong
E-E-A-T signals fared considerably better.
For smaller independent publishers, the challenge is structural.
Large news organisations with established brand authority and the resources
to invest in original investigation are better positioned to earn AI Mode
citations than smaller outlets. The search landscape that once gave
independent voices a fighting chance against established media through clever
SEO is becoming one where scale and institutional credibility are again the
primary determinants of visibility.
The Publishers’ Response
The publishing industry’s response to AI Mode has ranged from
legal action to negotiation to technical resistance. Several major publishers
have updated their robots.txt files to block specific Google AI crawlers,
accepting reduced search visibility in exchange for preventing their content
from being used to train or power AI responses without compensation. Others have
entered licensing discussions with Google, seeking agreements that would
provide financial returns for content usage in AI products.
Penske Media Corporation, publisher of Rolling Stone and The
Hollywood Reporter, filed a lawsuit against Google in September 2025 alleging
that AI Overviews illegally reproduced content from their websites while
reducing the incentive for users to visit the original source. The case is
part of a broader legal challenge to the assumption that summarising content
at scale falls within the bounds of fair use, with outcomes that will have
significant implications for how AI companies can use publicly available
journalism in their products.
This tension is examined further in the site’s analysis
of Google’s AI Overviews and publisher traffic. It also connects to
broader debates about AI-driven
content creation and what happens to the economics of original
journalism in a world where AI can synthesise rather than
link.
Adapting to the New Reality
The publishers navigating AI Mode most successfully share a common
characteristic: they are producing content that AI cannot easily replicate or
synthesise. Long-form investigations that surface genuinely new information,
interviews that provide first-person perspective unavailable from other
sources, analysis grounded in institutional expertise that cannot be
reconstructed from public data, these formats retain value in an AI-Mode
world because they are what AI Mode cites rather than
replaces.
What is clear from the first months of AI Mode’s full rollout is
that the relationship between search engines and publishers has entered a new
phase, one in which the implicit exchange that underpinned web publishing for
two decades, publish good content, receive search traffic, is being
fundamentally renegotiated. The terms of that renegotiation, who benefits,
who compensates whom, and what counts as fair use of journalistic investment,
will define the economics of online media for years to come.
The practical advice emerging from SEO practitioners tracking AI
Mode behaviour includes a focus on primary sources over aggregation, a
stronger emphasis on author credentials and institutional affiliations, and a
willingness to sacrifice some short-tail keyword traffic in exchange for
deeper coverage of topics where unique expertise is demonstrable. None of
this is simple, and for publishers whose economics depend on high volumes of
traffic to broad-interest topics, the adjustment is painful. What the
emergence of AI Mode has done, perhaps unintentionally, is create a clearer
hierarchy of content value than search algorithms had previously enforced.
Content that could only ever have been written by someone with genuine
knowledge and access is harder to displace by AI Mode than content assembled
from public sources. That is, at least in principle, good for journalism.
Whether it translates into sustainable economics for the journalists
producing it is a different question, and one that the industry will be
answering for years to come. The AI Mode era has arrived in full, and the
publishing business model must evolve to meet it.
About the Author
Stuart Kerr is the Technology Correspondent for LiveAIWire. He
covers artificial intelligence, digital media, and the companies shaping how
information moves online. Read
more about Stuart.