Major news outlets in Australia along with smaller tech news Companies are in crisis as the likes of Google and Meta uses artificial intelligence chatbots to basically throttle exposure of their content.

These are organisations who have invested in relying on Google to drive traffic to their sites, now they are paying the price of their reliance on social media Meta and Google to drive traffic claim observers.

One issue relates to the fact that Google has rolled out an “AI Overviews” feature in its search engine that demotes traditional “blue links” to other sites in favour of auto-generated summaries.

Last month, the search giant rolled out “AI Mode” – which is expected to make the problem even worse by responding to search queries with chatbot-style conversations and few direct links that drive traffic away from a media site.

Another issue is that some media organisations have reduced their investment in creating unique compelling content instead they rely on press releases that everyone gets at the same time.

Recently the Wall Street Journal reported that Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of news outlet The Atlantic, told employees earlier this year that they should assume traffic from Google will drop toward zero over time, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

“Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” Thompson told the Journal. “We have to develop new strategies.”

The dwindling traffic coupled with a slow advertising market is hurting revenue for cash-strapped newsrooms and fuelling layoffs among media Companies in Australia.

Back in 2021 when we first established ChannelNews and Smarthouse in Australia we chose not to invest in SEO Facebook or Google to drive traffic.

Instead, we developed our own editorial style and worked with partners who have large audiences to generate traffic.

Today over 90% of our traffic comes in directly.

When Business Insider slashed 21% of its staff in a newsroom-wide culling last month, CEO Barbara Peng said the move was meant to help “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”

Traffic to Business Insider’s website plunged by a whopping 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, according to data from analytics sites Similarweb.

In Australia major media groups have also lost more than half of its traffic during the past five years.

Nine Entertainment Group recently shut down several technology and culture news websites, including Kotaku, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker due to falling traffic and reduced revenues.

The move also affected Vice and Refinery29 at the time.

Globally big newspaper brands such as the Washington Post – another news organisation that has been racked by job cuts – has lost nearly half its search audience.

The rollout of AI-generated summaries in place of links “is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated,” Washington Post CEO William Lewis said.

Despite the traffic losses, Google has claimed that it is still funnelling traffic to news sites through search.

“Every day, we send billions of clicks to websites, and connecting people to the web continues to be a priority,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

“New experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode enhance Search and expand the types of questions people can ask, which creates new opportunities for content to be discovered.”

ChannelNews understands that a lot of the Google assisted traffic is fed to sites that have financial deals with Google or are key Google media partners for the purpose of generating more revenue for Google.

Web traffic from Facebook to Australian publishers collapsed by upwards of 50 per cent since the start of 2024, as the Meta-owned platform escalates its pivot away from news.

Figures compiled for internal use by several local publishers and data from analytics platform SimilarWeb show a precipitous fall in the amount of traffic reaching news articles published locally from Facebook during the past 12 months.

Critics, such as the News Media Alliance in the USA – a trade group that represents hundreds of news outlets in the USA including The Washington Post – has warned that AI Overviews and other Google-implemented AI features will have devastating consequences for the media industry.

They allege that Google and other AI giants have used news content to train their chatbots without proper credit or compensation – and then used those same products to erode traffic.

Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of News Media Alliance, blasted Googles’ rollout of AI Mode last month as “theft.”

“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” Coffey said. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”

The AI push comes as Google faces intense pressure from the Australian Federal Government over its business model.

Recently Facebook owner Meta refused to continue paying for news in Australia, announcing it will end its deals with local publishers when they expire this year in a decision that news companies say blatantly ignores the value of their journalism.

The government also blasted the move, describing it as “a dereliction of its commitment to the sustainability of Australian news media.”

Under investigation in the USA District Judge Amit Mehta is set to decide by August on how to break up Google’s illegal dominance over online search after labelling the company as a “monopolist” in an initial ruling last year. DOJ lawyers want Mehta to consider the future impact of AI when crafting remedies.

Elsewhere, Google recently lost a separate DOJ case with Governments in several Countries moving on social media Companies because of their dominance in various markets.