By Stuart Kerr, Technology Correspondent
Published: 04/08/2025
Last Updated: 04/08/2025
Contact: liveaiwire@gmail.com | Twitter: @LiveAIWire
Author Bio: About Stuart Kerr
Since its quiet rollout earlier this year, Google’s AI Mode has turned the online publishing ecosystem on its head. Once a background experiment in summarisation, the feature now powers zero-click answers across millions of searches. While it may streamline user experience, the backlash from independent news outlets, SEO strategists, and digital marketers is growing louder.
For publishers who depend on organic traffic, the implications are staggering. According to a Press Gazette study, news websites have seen click-through rates drop by as much as 47% since AI Mode was activated across broader query categories. The new interface prioritises AI-generated summaries above standard blue links, pushing original reporting further down the results page—if it appears at all.
This shift is especially notable given Google's emphasis on speed and summarisation over depth. In our report on Google AI Mode in Search Canvas Live, we observed that search results are increasingly shaped by generative summaries pulling from unnamed sources. For many, this is a sharp detour from Google's historic claim of “organising the world’s information.”
SEO professionals have echoed this concern. A Search Engine Land analysis found that average CTRs across retail and informational keywords fell by 38% within a month of rollout. Even branded queries are showing AI summaries as primary results, often without linking to the original source. This trend is changing not only how users interact with search, but whether they click at all.
Independent media is feeling the pinch hardest. As covered in The Winners and Losers of Google’s AI Mode, smaller publications that once relied on SEO for visibility now face algorithmic opacity. Their content is still scraped, but no longer credited in the way it once was. Google defends the change as part of its commitment to "useful content," yet many argue it's the clearest example yet of generative AI eroding the open web.
In our analysis of AI and Emotional Manipulation, we noted how algorithmic framing can shape user perception. The same holds true here. With AI Mode leading queries, users are exposed first to synthesized language—a product of the model, not the newsroom. This new architecture blurs the line between fact and prediction.
The concerns go beyond traffic loss. A AI Now Institute report warns that control over information pipelines by a handful of players presents a systemic risk to democratic discourse. When a search engine also writes the answer, the distinction between platform and publisher disappears.
Adding to this, a keyword frequency study by Eversana Intouch, titled "An Early Impact Analysis of Google’s AI Overviews", found that Google's summaries appear in over 78% of commercial-intent searches, often with no linked attribution. This shift is not just hurting publishers—it's reconfiguring the structure of search itself.
Technologists have praised New AI Model MoR Succeeds Transformers for enabling more memory-efficient, contextually aware summaries, the very backbone of AI Mode. But critics argue that such tools are being deployed without regard for ecosystem fallout. Transparency is scarce, and opt-out mechanisms for publishers remain non-existent.
This isn’t just an SEO story. It’s a story about power, access, and who gets to narrate the world. For now, it seems, Google does.
About the Author
Stuart Kerr is the Technology Correspondent for LiveAIWire. He writes about artificial intelligence, ethics, and how technology is reshaping everyday life. Read more