o16g highlighted an article about the impact of Google AI Overviews on search traffic, “Evidence Grows That Google’s AI Overviews Have Eviscerated the Media Industry.” It’s not pretty:

The firm looked at data from Ahrefs tracking web traffic to 10 major tech outlets from early 2024 to early 2026. At their peak, the media companies brought in 112 million site visits per month from Google users in the US. By January of this year, that number was down to a little under 50 million — with some outlets losing over 90 percent of their traffic since the new feature rolled out.

It’s also not the first time we’ve been through this. Facebook Instant Articles. AMP.

I already wrote about this. Either your experience, your creative output, your brand is worth somebody paying for, or you’re going to fall victim to enshittification and literally beg Google — anyone — to provide a better experience than you do.

Disrupting yourself

To Google’s credit, AI Overviews were clearly a huge risk and experiment. The easy path would have been to keep betting on search results — undoubtedly cheaper, easier, safer, and more trustworthy — rather than take the hits of moving fast with AI Overviews.

Except — duh — the chat bots were coming.

The vulnerability of websites to being front-run by search is nothing compared to the vulnerability of search to LLMs. Particularly OpenAI, who has hired basically every 2014-era Facebooker to build a platform, ad network, and everything else (except shopping!) on the way to the actual destination: search ads.

Rough places to be

If Google primarily controls your business model for revenue — or growth — bet against continued expansion of AI Overviews at your peril. You might think that your content is so dynamic, so changing that there’s no way Google (or anyone) is going to be continuously ingesting and retraining models with it.

But then you read the article Bruce Schneier recently linked to about poisoning ai training data. This is a threat I’ve also written op-eds about here and here. From the BBC’s article:

I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs”. Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission, including Drew Harwell at the Washington Post and Nicky Woolf, who co-hosts my podcast. (Want to hear more about this story? Check out episode 2 of The Interface, the BBC’s new tech podcast.)

Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills.

Less than 24 hours later. At Google’s scale, there’s no rate of change or depth of content that is going to overwhelm the regular retraining of the Gemini-3-micro-nano-flash-scrappy-doo they’re using to power AI overviews.

The trafficpocalypse is going to be a lot rougher than the saaspocalypse

Smart people have already priced traffic loss into news sites. And we’re watching AI get priced into SaaS. But what I suspect they are missing is the impact coming for every site — media, content, social media, you name it — that relies on subscriptions. These sites are going to face incredible pressure, too, because even the stickiest sites with subscriptions suffer churn.

And how do you reclaim those users? You spam them across email and SMS while paying for ads. Because people love that.

You also do your best to drive organic search traffic.

And that, my friends, is going away.