From time to time, Marketecture invites guest authors to weigh in with their unique insights on the media, marketing, and ad tech spaces. Today’s guest author, Karsten Weide, Principal and Chief Analyst at W Media Research, explores how AI-driven search is rewriting the rules of digital publishing and what that shift means for publishers, advertisers, and the vendors caught in the middle.

For more than two decades, digital publishers and advertisers have lived in a kind of uneasy symbiosis with Google. Publishers produced the content, Google indexed it, and users clicked through to read it. The traffic supported ad sales, and AdTech vendors built their businesses around enabling that exchange.

But today, that balance is being upended by AI. Search is undergoing its most dramatic transformation since the invention of paid search. AI-powered overviews and conversational chatbots are no longer experimental features. They’re becoming the default experience for millions of users. And that spells trouble for the publishers and vendors who depend on referral traffic to survive.

There are actually more searches than ever. Google handled more than 5 trillion searches in 2024, up 22% year over year. On the surface, search looks healthier than ever.

But the way those searches get answered is shifting fast. Historically, Google’s job was to serve up “ten blue links,” which sent you to external websites for answers. Increasingly, though, those answers now appear right on the results page in AI-generated overviews.

The result? Fewer clicks to publishers. By May 2025, nearly 70% of searches ended without any click at all, up from about 60% a few years earlier. When an AI overview appears, the zero-click rate jumps to 80–83%. Independent studies have shown sites ranked first under an AI summary can lose up to 70% of their click-through rates.

So while users are searching more, they’re leaving publishers out of the loop.

The pain is not evenly distributed. Industries that thrive on informational content are on the frontlines:

By contrast, transactional queries (like e-commerce searches) have been relatively insulated so far. But no one expects that protection to last forever.

Here’s the paradox: Google search queries are growing, yet referrals to publisher sites are shrinking. How?

A big part of the answer lies in AI bots. These systems scrape websites to feed large language models or to pull snippets for AI overviews. They inflate search volumes but don’t deliver human readers, let alone ad impressions.

Meanwhile, Google itself has every incentive to keep users inside its own ecosystem. More impressions on its pages mean more ad inventory for Google, but fewer downstream clicks for publishers. It’s the illusion of abundance: more queries, fewer referrals.

AdTech intermediaries are caught in the middle. Their platforms depend on publishers having enough impressions to sell. With less inventory in the market, transaction volumes shrink, squeezing revenues across supply-side platforms, exchanges, and other players.

But there’s also an opening here. Vendors that help publishers branch out beyond advertising - whether through subscriptions, commerce, or even licensing deals with AI platforms - can reposition themselves as essential partners in a tougher environment. Think of it less as ad tech and more as revenue tech.

Publishers aren’t standing still. Faced with what one executive called a “near-zero traffic future” from Google, they’re pursuing several strategies:

The unifying theme is this: Survival will depend on reducing reliance on search-driven traffic and building revenue streams publishers can truly own.

This isn’t just about lost clicks. It’s about a fundamental restructuring of the digital economy. For decades, publishers could rely on search referrals as a predictable pipeline of audience and revenue. That pipeline is drying up - and fast.

AI-powered search promises faster, cleaner answers for users. But for publishers and the AdTech ecosystem that supports them, it looks more like a black hole, sucking in attention and leaving little behind.

The way forward will be uneven. Some publishers with strong brands, loyal subscribers, or diversified revenue will adapt. Others - especially niche players dependent on search referrals - may not survive. For AdTech vendors, the task is to evolve into true partners in revenue diversification.

One thing is clear: The era of easy traffic from Google is over. Publishers and vendors that thrive in the AI era will be those that stop waiting for clicks and start building owned, lasting relationships with their audiences.

This post is an excerpt of W Media Research’s research note “How AI Search Threatens Pubs And Vendors – And What To Do About It”, 1 table, 3 figures, 11 pages, US$ 1,200.

Karsten Weide has 30 years of experience as a researcher, producer, and product manager in the advertising and media & entertainment industries. At his research company, W Media Research, LLC, he specializes in advertising technology, serving vendors, publishers, agencies, and brands with market intelligence and go-to-market work. Previous engagements include IDC, Yahoo, and Ziff-Davis. Weide is the two-time winner of IDC’s Research Quality Award as well as of the Research Innovation Award and the Excellence Award for Business Development.