Even if you haven’t actively sought to use AI, you’ve probably noticed that when you search for something on Google like “how to make sourdough bread starter,” there’s likely an “AI Overview” near the top of the results page that gives you the entire recipe—clear step-by-step instructions and the full list of ingredients. Below that, assuming you continue scrolling down, is what you’re used to seeing: a bunch of blue links to cooking sites that you now don’t need to visit. By following that AI summary and ignoring the links, you’ve unknowingly helped usher in the end of the web as we’ve known it—and, in the process, perhaps helped doom the media companies that produce the information you rely on.
The impact of AI on online publishers, which historically have relied on search traffic for a big chunk of their readerships, has been profound. According to a 2025 report from online-analytics firm Similarweb, traffic to news sites dropped by 26 percent in the 12 months after Google introduced AI Overviews. Last June, Business Insider reported that monthly search traffic to its site had dropped by 55 percent between April 2022 and April 2025. Publishers like People Inc. (the parent company of People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, and others), as well as titles like Wired and the Wall Street Journal, are preparing for what they’re calling Google Zero, the point at which referral traffic from the search giant dwindles to nothing.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Google Zero would mark the end of a social contract that online media has operated under for more than two decades: Publish articles to the web, let people read them, and make money through advertising. When search engines provide AI-generated answers instead of links, people no longer need to click through to the original sources of information, meaning they will no longer view the ads. But while AI may be what tears the social contract, the reality is that this arrangement has been fraying for several years.
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER
In the beginning, Google functioned essentially as the internet’s front door, organizing the chaos of millions of sites into something searchable. Publishers quickly realized that survival required optimizing their articles for Google’s algorithms by using specific keywords, headlines, and site designs to maximize traffic. This birthed search engine optimization, a strategy that eventually pushed many journalists to write for search results rather than for actual readers. Doing this started, in many cases, a race to the bottom in terms of editorial quality. This was perhaps best exemplified by Demand Media, a company whose websites used traffic data to churn out cheaply made, repetitive stories designed to rank first in Google’s results.
Today, AI can be used to mass-produce these spammy clickbait sites and further siphon search traffic from publishers. Compounding matters is the shift to programmatic ads, which track your activity across the web and your apps to serve you targeted messages based on your profile, regardless of the specific site you’re visiting. These developments have eroded the ad dollars earned by publishers.
Alongside these changes, traffic from social media to publishers’ sites has also declined. Facebook and X have shifted toward personalized algorithmic feeds—designed to show you more posts from friends and content creators than from publishers, which has further reduced clicking over to news sites. X even began down-ranking posts containing outbound links, preferring to keep you trapped inside the app rather than send you to a news site. Meta is testing a plan on Facebook that requires businesses that want to share more than two links per month to sign up for a paid service.
AI AND YOU
So what can be done? How will your ability to access news and information be affected? To be clear, there’s no going back to the way things were. I say that as someone who benefited greatly from the early phases of this social contract. I helped pioneer blogging as a business, having been part of the creation of both Gawker Media (I started Gizmodo, the first site there) and Weblogs Inc. (where I also helmed Engadget). Both were networks of blogs that thrived from 2002 to 2008, an era when search traffic supplemented what was primarily readers who were choosing to visit sites directly or finding their way there by clicking a link on another blog or site. It was a period when advertisers worked more directly with publishers and were frequently comfortable with paying higher rates to reach the audiences they sought. Putting sites behind a paywall was not even remotely a consideration; the goals were to be as widely shared and accessible as possible, to gain credibility, to be highly ranked in Google’s search results, and to attract premium advertisers.
While it’s difficult to predict the future, especially given how rapidly the internet is changing because of AI, here are six directions in which online media might go (and these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive):
1. More publishers adopt paywalls: If you’re looking for high-quality, professionally produced news and information, the odds are pretty good in 2026 that if you haven’t already done so, you’re going to have to take out your credit card and pay for it. More and more publishers are putting most or all of their articles behind paywalls, while a universe of paid newsletters, mainly offering opinion and analysis, has materialized on platforms like Substack and Beehiiv. Yet there are already complaints about “subscription fatigue” setting in, with many readers hitting the limit for how many publications they’re willing to pay for.
2. Publishers optimize for AI: With search traffic declining and more people using AI tools, some publications are turning to so-called generative engine optimization (GEO), strategies to help their sites show up as references in the answers created by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and others. It’s not clear yet whether this will be enough to cover declines in search traffic, but just as writing articles to show up in Google changed journalism, we should expect to see other, perhaps unexpected, adjustments to what gets created for GEO and how.
3. “Newsfluencers” become important: With traditional journalism in retreat, online creators have filled the gap. According to a recent study from Reuters, 54 percent of Americans say they get news from social media, a larger percentage than for any other source, including television (50 percent). You’ve probably found yourself scrolling through Reels or TikTok and caught a clip of a podcast in which the host is talking about recent news events in a sensational manner. Because these platforms typically pay creators a share of ad revenue, those who are adept at getting the algorithms to surface their content can generate substantial incomes.
4. News is treated as a public good: Publicly supported media is nothing new, and although the Trump administration is currently going in the opposite direction, as publications shut down or erect paywalls, state governments may choose to subsidize their local news industries. This would ensure that consumers have unfettered access to high-quality news and information. Governments could even tax AI companies to pay for this.
5. Publishers will be paid to feed AI: Even though it might seem as if AI tools have the answer to every question you might ask, the truth is that they are only as good as the data they’re trained on or can access. The big AI companies have largely exhausted every source they can draw from, including the entirety of the publicly available web and virtually every book they’ve been able to find (whether they’ve done that legally or by engaging in massive copyright infringement is a matter currently working its way through the courts). But there will always be topics about which the AIs don’t have adequate knowledge, especially anything related to gathering information about current events (otherwise known as journalism). Given AI companies’ unquenchable thirst for more, it could make economic sense for them to pay people to create new content. What’s more, writing made by humans may prove to be especially valuable as more of what gets published online is generated by AI. Google has already struck a deal to license Reddit’s human-written archives, and Amazon has a similar arrangement with the New York Times. It’s not inconceivable that AI firms would purchase media outlets simply to get exclusive access to their articles.
6. Print survives: Marshall McLuhan said, “Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.” Just as we still purchase mechanical watches and vinyl records, for their signaling value more than for their utility, print is likely to transition from a form of mass media into a luxury object. If that’s the case, it may be that one of the best ways to support an online publication you love will be to purchase it in print. The Onion, which stopped its print edition in 2013, resurrected it under new ownership in 2024, offering it as a perk for online subscribers.
JUST ASK GOOGLE
The social contract that defined my early career—the one that led to publications like Gizmodo and Engadget being not just viable but widely read—is rapidly reaching its expiration date. It’s easy to see generative AI as a tragedy befalling the media industry, but I prefer to see it as a new opportunity for publishers to offer only what is truly worth our time and attention. Our need for knowledge and an understanding of the world hasn’t gone away; what is changing is how we value journalism. We should turn our attention away from sites that don’t fully respect it, and we should support the publishers we care about by paying for the news and information they provide us.
Incidentally, Google agrees. My asking the search engine “what does the end of search traffic mean for media companies?” yields the following response:
“[The] decline in traditional search traffic” for media companies, driven by AI-powered search engines giving direct answers, means a potential collapse of their traditional ad-revenue model, forcing a pivot to subscriptions and direct audience relationships by focusing on unique high-value content (investigations, expert analysis) rather than commoditized news.•
Peter Rojas is a San Francisco–based technologist and writer. He serves as senior vice president of new products at Mozilla, a nonprofit organization known for its web browser, Firefox.
