Publishers report “negligible” impact of Google AI overviews on traffic

Two major publishers – Dotdash Meredith and Ziff Davis – say Google AI Overviews have had no significant impact on their traffic.

What Dotdash Meredith says. The IAC (owner of Dotash) wrote the following in its Q2 2024 shareholder letter:

• “Google started rolling out AI Overviews in mid-May, and the impact on our traffic has been negligible. Referrals from Google searches generate less than half of our traffic, and our analysis shows that about 15% of searches in our categories return AI-generated answers, with this being most common in the health, technology, and finance categories. The differences in click-through rate between pages with and without AI Overviews are small so far, but it’s early days and products change quickly, so the past is not prologue.”

What Ziff Davis says. Here’s what Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, said on the company’s quarterly earnings call:

• “I know there continues to be investor interest in the impact of AI on search. …Now that the AI ​​overview experience is in full swing, we wanted to revisit the analysis we conducted in Q3 2023 on the frequency of AI overviews presented to users.
• “We analyzed thousands of searches across our most important domains, which generate the lion’s share of our organic search referrals, and the percentage of times an AI summary was displayed. That percentage dropped to 8%, meaning that 92% of the time the search engine results page did not include an AI summary for the most important searches for us. Analysis by other industry experts shows a similar percentage of total searches that resulted in AI summaries.
• “At this point, we don’t see this as a significant change to the search experience.”

But. While this all makes sense, it’s important to remember that Google AI Overviews adoption has been fairly limited and inconsistent so far. According to BrightEdge research, AI Overviews appeared in 7% of searches overall at the end of July. In May, AI Overviews’ presence peaked at 15%.

While Ziff Davis may not view AI Overviews as a “significant change” to the Google search experience, I would add the word “yet” to the end of that sentence, because Google has made it clear that search is evolving toward AI Overviews.

Why we care. Generative AI has only just begun to reshape search, and AI will continue to do so over the next decade. Granted, these two reports form a line, not a trend. But AI Overviews (and before that, Search Generative Experience) have generated a lot of angst among SEOs, publishers, and content creators, so it’s helpful to get some insight into how the impact is affecting publishers in these early days of AI Overviews.