Publishers and advertisers worldwide are slowly waking up to dramatic drops in organic traffic. The launch of AI Overview last week which was first tested via Search Generative Experience (SGE) by some estimates will lead to a drop of 25% or more in organic traffic.

“Raptive, which helps sell digital ads for 5,000 independent creators’ websites, initially estimated AI Overviews could cut visits by as much as 25% and cause the industry to lose $2 billion in annual ad revenue. However, Raptive chief innovation officer Marc McCollum now thinks that is “maybe [on the] very low end.” ”

With nearly 1/3 of all traffic for top 100 publishers coming from Google, publishers will gradually then suddenly experience a dramatic impact.

“For the New York Times — where 32.5% of organic traffic in April came from Google — that adds up to around 250 million visits. However, other U.S. publishers are even more reliant on the search engine. Google accounted for 72% of organic traffic to Forbes and 60% of traffic for the websites of USA Today, Business Insider and Newsweek.”

Whilst other industry experts aren’t fearing the worst, major publishers aren’t waiting around for the impact and have been signing deals to have their content indexed with rival services such Reddit and OpenAI.

““It will have an impact, but I don’t expect it to be as substantial as many fear,” said Kyle Byers, director of growth marketing at Semrush. “It may even have a positive impact on average since AI Overviews link back to source web pages. An improved experience for Google users could also result in more searches being made, which is another way it could lead to increased traffic for publishers and content creators.””

I can already hear the questions and speculation as to why traffic is down in boardrooms across the country over the coming months.