• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) has had a devastating impact on publishers, reducing their organic traffic by huge numbers. But there is one type of content where it has not lowered rates: breaking news. 

On the contrary, breaking news is up by 103% across all Google Surfaces. “The Top Stories carousel, where Breaking News lives and provides publishers with the most valuable organic search real estate, has so far been protected from AI Overviews incursion,” says a blog post from Define Media Group (DMG) on its new study.  

The main driver of this growth is Google Discover, a content feed based on prior search activity. 

“This mirrors the general trend we’re seeing, which is that as Web Search has declined, Discover has grown at a rapid pace," DMG reports. "For the first time in our history, Discover and Web Search send an equal amount of traffic to the Define Media Group panel.”

Of course, this has to do with the nature of the content. 

“Currently, a news query like “iran war” doesn’t trigger an AIO,” DMG writes. “Instead, the Top Stories carousel appears, presenting a compelling image card and headline which encourages users to click through to the publisher’s story. AIOs are completely absent from this search result.”

It also may be that large language models may be unable to retrieve and generate summaries at the pace required by breaking news events DMG notes.

And, “likely as a hedge against technical limitations and inaccurate information, breaking news content has been spared from generative summation,” it adds.

But remember—this is a report based primarily on DMG's clients, although other reports also point to large traffic losses caused by AIO. 

Here are the percentages of the queries generating AIO:

• Science—43.6%
• Health—43%
• Pets & Animals—36.9%
• People & Society—35.5%
• Computers & Electronics—27.5%
• Law & Government—26.1%
• Job & Education—24.8%
• Travel—23.2%
• Food & Drink—21.4%
• Home & Garden—20.9%
• Finance—19.7%
• Autos & Vehicles—18.3%
• Games—17.1%
• Arts & Entertainment—16.2%
• News—15.1%
• Sports—14.8%
• Real Estate—5.8%
• Shopping—3.2%

What can publishers do? They should “scrutinize their Discover traffic patterns, to understand how to better optimize for Discover as a unique, stand-alone marketing and content channel,” the study states.

DMG classified content from the top 15 news sites in its panel: breaking news, evergreen, landing pages, and homepage. Breaking news was the only one that grew. Evergreen content showed the sharpest decline. 

The full report can be read here.