• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

The traffic declines suffered by publishers from mid-2024 into 2025 are continuing, but not all because of Google’s AI Overviews that were blamed for the earlier problems.

One cause is the crawling of news sites by bots to feed large language models (LLMs), according to a study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. 

This has led to “predictions of adverse impact on news publishers in the form of lowered consumer demand, reduced demand for newsroom employees, and an increase in news 'slop,'" write the authors, Hangcheng Zhao of Rutgers Business School at Rutgers University, and Ron Berman of the Wharton School.

How is this affecting traffic?

“First, we find a consistent and moderate decline in traffic to news publishers occurring after August 2024,” the authors add. “Second, using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that blocking GenAI bots can have adverse effects on large publishers by reducing total website traffic by 23% and real consumer traffic by 14% compared to not blocking.”  

It’s not all bad news. The authors did “not find evidence that LLMs are replacing editorial or content-production jobs yet. The share of new editorial and content-production job listings increases over time.”

On another front, they detected “no evidence that large publishers increased text volume; instead, they significantly increased rich content and use more advertising and targeting technologies.” 

Unfortunately, traffic has also suffered from disruptions tied to Google’s December 2025 core update. 

News publishers in India “got walloped,” wrote William Flannigan, senior SEO editor for The Wall Street Journal, on LinkedIn, according to Search Engine Roundtable.  

But the problem was not limited to India.  

On X, Glenn Gabe reported “seeing a number of news publishers with heavy impact. I have also had several publishers reach out over the past few days explaining the volatility they are seeing (and across surfaces like Discover, Google News, Top Stories, and the News tab in Search)."  

Gabe added: “Some news and media publishers have been nuked from Discover with this update.”

So the last 18 months have been a shaky period for news publishers. Early last year, Google’s AI Overviews caused traffic to 37 of the 50 top news domains, Similarweb reported.