The news: Traffic to the top 100 web publishers has fallen 21% since August 2021, per a Similarweb analysis, with notable declines since the broad rollout of Google’s AI Overviews in 2024. Monthly visits to the tracked websites peaked at 7 billion in August 2024 during the presidential election cycle but fell to 4.9 billion visits by August of this year.

That decline reflects the growing prominence of AI search results and devaluing of open web ad space.

The news comes amid rising tension between AI companies and publishers. Court filings from a New York Times copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed that Microsoft execs called AI the “largest theft of labor in human history.” The filings also show that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the chatbots give “information right there on the website on the AI platform versus needing to go to the underlying source.”

More than 300 news publishers will soon meet with lawmakers to press for legislation restricting AI bot scraping. Meanwhile, Cloudfare has introduced controls that let publishers manage search and AI crawlers.

Zooming out: Publisher traffic has cratered as search queries increasingly return AI overviews that summarize news articles. Though these summaries often link to the original source, declining clickthrough rates and search web traffic show fewer consumers are taking that extra step of visiting publishers.

On Google, AI overviews often occupy the top space on a search result page. While that results in lower traffic for publishers, it also harms advertisers: US organic click share fell from 44.9% in March 2026 to 40% by June, per Datos and SparkToro. Meanwhile, clicks to Google-owned properties rose from 14.8% to 17.1% in the same period. Paid link CTRs drop from 13% to 6% when AI overviews are present.

Implications for marketers: AI is pushing traffic and ad buying further toward walled gardens, and ad spending is following, a dynamic visible in the gap between US walled garden and open web programmatic spending. As marketers look for the highest ROI channels, spending on walled gardens will increase. That could mean greater competition and higher costs on the dominant platforms, while publisher inventory becomes cheaper—but perhaps less effective.

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