AI is hammering the news business

Generative artificial intelligence is having a big impact on the news business. And it’s mostly been negative so far.
For starters, internet search traffic has shifted rapidly from traditional search engines that provide links to relevant content to providing straight-up answers. That has led to news publishers losing traffic and advertising revenue. The situation has gotten dire for the news business.
For many years, publications taught journalists to load their articles with popular search terms or keywords in hopes of ranking highly on Google search pages. This technique, called search engine optimization (SEO), is now on life support.
News publishers are preparing for a scenario called “Google Zero,” when internet searches on Google result in zero click-throughs to the source information.
AI (including Google Gemini) has changed the way people discover information online. Industry pundits are advocating approaches called GEO and AEO (generative/answer engine optimization) by structuring their articles to be the source for the large language models used by AI.
News organizations also have pivoted to getting traffic from other sources such as Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and within AI chatbots.
For news publishers to survive, experts say that they need to lean into Google’s E-E-A-T principles (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness).
But those actions might be just a Band-Aid for a bigger problem.
Meanwhile, large media organizations are suing AI companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic for using their content to train AI models without compensating the media companies. Some media firms have reached content licensing deals in lieu of litigation.
“To many publishers, Google’s AI Overviews feel uncomfortably close to a kind of IP (intellectual property) heist: The company ingests their journalism, surfaces synthesized answers at the top of Search and increasingly cuts off the traffic that once compensated publishers for their work,” Andy Meek, Forbes senior contributor said in a recent article.

Related articles:

Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search (Adweek; July 8, 2026)

Who’s suing AI and who’s signing (Press Gazette; July 3, 2026)

Report: Google Zero Click Searches To Open Web Fall To 27.6% (Search Engine Roundtable; June 10, 2026)

Google Search AI Overhaul Leaves Publishers Bracing For ‘Google Zero’ (Forbes; May 25, 2026)

Photo: Image generated by Google Gemini.