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Google Zero Dark Thirty

Traffic is collapsing for publishers as the web reorients around A.I. The market is responding, too, with U.S. advertisers expected to spend over $25 billion, or about 14 percent of their search budgets, on A.I.-powered search by 2029. The good news is that people are making and consuming more media than ever—even if the business itself becomes unrecognizable.

Sundar Pichai
As Alphabet C.E.O. Sundar Pichai has said about Google’s AI Overview product, and Sam Altman has noted about ChatGPT, these “answer engines” still contain citations, sources, and links to related articles. But that doesn’t do diddly for a business model when fewer and fewer people are clicking on them. Photo: Damian Lemanski/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Julia Alexander
July 2, 2025

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I was having drinks the other day with a top media executive, discussing our excitement and anxieties about the forthcoming A.I. era, when this person made a startling admission. Their business, a major digital-first news company with more than 3,000 employees, was publishing more content than ever. And yet, the executive confessed, their search traffic was collapsing. With Google providing A.I. summaries, there wasn’t much of a reason for users to visit the websites where humans were doing actual reporting. Alas, it was a now familiar story about life in the news business in the age of Google Zero—industry parlance for the search giant’s lurch toward no longer sending traffic to third-parties, thereby ushering in the post-search era.