And now, the main event…

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.

A generation ago, the internet stole print advertising budgets, spawning a new generation of digital-first publishers that benefited from social media and search traffic. Now, artificial intelligence–based tools like Google AI Overview, Perplexity, and ChatGPT are siphoning off what remains of publisher traffic, providing much of the information users need within their own ecosystems. Since Google introduced AI Overviews in May 2024, the percentage of zero-click news-related queries has increased from 56 percent to nearly 70 percent, according to a new Similarweb report. To take one example, Business Insider, which recently announced it was laying off 21 percent of its staff, has seen its organic search traffic collapse by 55 percent, per The Wall Street Journal.

Of course, the digital advertising market is also being disrupted. Google, which still accounts for 86 percent of search activity in the U.S., has begun testing ads alongside its A.I. results as a way to monetize these shiny new tools. If the past is prologue, the impacts will be significant. According to eMarketer research, U.S. ad budgets allocated to A.I. search will increase from less than 1 percent this year to about 14 percent in 2029, or more than $25 billion. For comparison, Pew estimates that newspaper advertising revenue fell from nearly $50 billion in 2005 to less than $10 billion in 2022. It’s hardly an exaggeration, as my lunch companion may have recognized deep down, that we’re in for a media brand extinction event. The good news, perhaps, is that it was sort of overdue?

Search links, which the News Media Alliance recently called “the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” aren’t going away. 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. According to a recent Bain study, close to 60 percent of people who come across news via search, or through social media like X, don’t actually click on the link. Furthermore, around 30 percent of clicks within the new gateway platforms, like Threads, go to sister properties like Instagram, a report from Similarweb found in March.

Last year, ostensibly cognizant of a potential P.R. problem, Google released “Offerwall,” a tool designed to give publishers other options, beyond traditional ads, to monetize their content. They included allowing customers to access content via micropayments, a streamlined newsletter signup process, taking surveys, or even watching shortform ads (like the ones you sit through before connecting to Wi-Fi at the airport). Although Google says that more than 1,000 publishers have tested Offerwall, and participants have seen a 9 percent increase in revenue on average, the potential of the program is unclear.

Of course, news publishers aren’t going to stop publishing on the web. Nor are they going to start ignoring Google, still the strongest driver of traffic on every major digital gateway. But digital-first publishers need to begin scenario planning now for the post-search era. After all, news-related prompts in ChatGPT increased by more than 210 percent between January 2024 and May 2025, according to Similarweb. Searches related to stocks, finance, and sports were the most popular, providing an indication of which types of digital publishers will be at risk from A.I. first.

And those numbers will continue to climb. In the Bain study, researchers found that about 80 percent of people who use search engines rely on A.I.-surfaced results at least 40 percent of the time. Meanwhile, 48 percent of respondents in the study said they now use platforms like ChatGPT as a primary news source. Similarweb’s analysis also showed that traffic referrals from ChatGPT increased 25x year-over-year between May 2024 and May 2025, but if users do click on one of the source links provided in the query response, they’re most likely going to publications that have partnerships with OpenAI.

For publishers who haven’t already entered into content licensing deals with OpenAI, there are a few alternative strategies. One is to avoid the temptation to scale. A common thread between successful content creators like Casey Newton on Substack, Hasan Piker on Twitch, and Kyla Scanlon on TikTok (and also on Substack) is the intensity of their audiences, not their size. Obviously, of course, this strategy is not available to the vast majority of the market.

Digital publishers have also been building moats around their businesses by pivoting from search and social traffic–fueled advertising toward subscription and direct-sold revenue models. Global analysts have tracked the convergence of two separate revenue sources: Onscreen advertising has continuously contracted over the past couple of years, while subscription revenue has slowly increased. In Q1, about 70 percent of U.S. publishers said that subscription revenue was becoming a bigger and more important part of their business, up from 56 percent in the same period the year prior, according to a recent Digiday survey. That signals a significant shift in where consumers are willing to spend.

Of course, if companies like OpenAI and Google can unlock true superintelligence, the implications for news, content, and everything else are hard to predict. There will be more websites powered by A.I. content, including aggregated human reporting and other hybrid models. These new players will compete for space within search results, making the market for attention far more competitive. A news environment suffused with A.I. could either improve consumer trust in the media, or obliterate it entirely. In the latter scenario, verified, human-reported news could become more valuable than ever. In a world where human connection is being erased with every prompt, we may see higher demand for smaller, more subject-focused publications and top reporting talent. That may not reverse ad market trends, but it opens the door to more creative monetization opportunities.

And yet there’s no denying that, for many publishers, the A.I. era will lead to an apocalypse, the nature of which is already becoming clear. For generations, text-based media properties—glossy magazines, periodicals, local papers, etcetera—made their money by super-serving highly intentional, affinity-driven audiences. The rise of search engines and social platforms misled many onto a growth-at-all-costs path in which they used similar tools to scale. All of a sudden, very different media properties found themselves covering the same generic stories, using the same traffic-dependent business models, and over-reliant on the same third-party distribution channels… which have all proven entirely vulnerable to the rise of LLMs.

There is undoubtedly a tragedy baked into all this—people will lose their jobs, businesses will fold, once-loved brands will disappear. On the flip side, though, the industry may have a chance to learn from the carnage and rediscover what worked in the first place.

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