Editorials & Other Articles

Google Discover adds AI summaries, threatening publishers with further traffic declines
Sarah Perez
10:19 AM PDT · July 15, 2025

As publishers fret about decreased traffic from Google, the search giant has begun rolling out AI summaries in Discover, the main news feed inside Google’s search app on iOS and Android. Now, instead of seeing a headline from a major publication, users will see multiple news publishers’ logos in the top-left corner, followed by an AI-generated summary that cites those sources.

The app warns that these summaries are generated with AI, “which can make mistakes.”

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Earlier data from the firm also found that the number of news searches on the web that result in no click-throughs to news websites had grown from 56% in May 2024, when AI Overviews launched, to nearly 69% as of May 2025. Organic traffic also declined, dropping from over 2.3 billion visits at its peak in mid-2024 to fewer than 1.7 billion, it noted.

Amid this shift, Google Discover still remained a source for clicks, even as traffic from Google Search declined. But that may no longer be the case if the AI summaries roll out more broadly within the Google app.

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