For two decades, a blue underlined link represented the currency of the internet. Rank well on Google, and traffic would follow. But in 2025, that fundamental bargain between search engines, publishers, and users is collapsing.

The numbers paint a stark picture: 60% of Google searches now end without any click to an external website, while systematic research tracking 7,392 product review queries over a year concluded that search engine results are measurably getting worse.

Publishers who once counted on Google for their lifeblood are watching their traffic evaporate—with some experiencing drops as steep as 70%.

This isn’t just anecdotal frustration.

Multiple independent studies, industry data, and publisher testimony converge on two undeniable trends: search quality is degrading under the weight of spam and optimisation tactics, and Google’s new AI-powered features are fundamentally restructuring how—or whether—people visit websites at all.

The Spam Problem: When Low-Quality Content Wins

In January 2024, researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics published findings that confirmed what many had suspected: the majority of search results use affiliate marketing, and there’s a high correlation between affiliate links and search rankings alongside an inverse relationship with article quality.

The study examined three major search engines over one year and reached a troubling conclusion. Higher-ranked pages are on average more optimised, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality.

Rather than rewarding the best information, search engines are increasingly surfacing content engineered specifically to game their algorithms.

The scale of the problem has accelerated with AI-generated content powered by large language models (LLMs). AI-generated pages are able to game Google’s algorithm to appear near the top of search results, even if the pages are of middling quality.

LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude have made it trivially easy to produce thousands of SEO-optimised articles at minimal cost, flooding search results with plausible-sounding but often shallow content.

The combination of traditional SEO spam farms and new AI content mills has created what researchers describe as an overall downwards trend in text quality across all three search engines, with the line between benign content and spam becoming increasingly blurry.

Former Google CEO Marissa Mayer acknowledged the underlying issue, stating that the quality of the internet has taken a hit.

When Google began in the late 1990s, it indexed roughly 30 million web pages. Today, that number has exploded to over a trillion URLs, making quality control exponentially more difficult.

The User Experience: More Frustrated, Less Satisfied

The degradation isn’t just technical—users are noticing. A survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults found that 42% said Google and search engines are becoming less useful, while 66% said the quality of information is deteriorating, making it difficult to find reliable sources.

The monetization of search results has become particularly aggressive. 76% of respondents said that more than a quarter of Google Search shopping results appear to be sponsored or promoted, with only 14% describing these sponsored results as very helpful.

Trust in traditional search is eroding as users seek alternatives. 55% said they get information from their community more than online search platforms. Platforms like Reddit, TikTok, and niche communities are capturing search intent that Google once monopolised.

The Rise of Zero-Click Search

Even as search quality degrades, a parallel revolution is reshaping the landscape: the rise of zero-click searches, where users get their answers directly on the search results page without visiting any website.

The statistics are staggering. In March 2025, 27.2% of U.S. searches ended without a click compared to 24.4% in March 2024. But that understates the full picture. Only 40.3% of U.S. Google searchers clicked on an organic result in March 2025, down from 44.2% the prior year.

The remaining clicks increasingly stay within Google’s ecosystem. 14.3% of U.S. Google searches resulted in clicks on other Google-owned properties like YouTube and Maps in March, compared to 12.1% a year ago.

Mobile devices amplify the trend. On phones, 77% of queries end without visiting another website, compared to 46.5% on desktop. For mobile users, leaving the search page is becoming the exception rather than the rule.

AI Overviews: The Accelerant

Google’s AI Overviews—AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results—launched broadly in May 2024 and have rapidly become the primary driver of zero-click searches.

The share of queries triggering AI Overviews jumped from 6.49% in January 2025 to 13.14% in March 2025, more than doubling in just two months.

The impact on click-through rates is devastating. Research tracking 68,000 real search queries found that users clicked on results 8% of the time when AI summaries appeared, compared to 15% without them—a 46.7% relative reduction.

When an AI Overview appeared in results, clickthrough rates declined by 15.49%, and when both AI Overviews and featured snippets are displayed, CTRs drop 37.04%. For specific categories, the damage is even worse.

Websites in the top four positions for searches using terms like what, when, where, and how saw over a 7% decrease in clickthrough rates.

The physical real estate AI Overviews occupy pushes traditional results far down the page. These overviews take up 1,345 pixels when expanded and 403 pixels when collapsed, with the first organic result pushed down to 1,686 pixels—well below standard screen sizes.

Publishers in Crisis

The traffic losses for publishers have been catastrophic. Across eight weeks in May and June 2025, the median year-over-year decline in referred traffic from Google Search was 10% overall, with news brands down 7% and non-news brands down 14%.

Traffic to the world’s 500 most visited publishers has dropped 27% year on year since February 2024, an average of 64 million visits per month.

For some individual publishers, the damage has been existential. CNN suffered traffic declines between 27% and 38% year-over-year, with visits falling from approximately 440 million in 2024 to around 311-323 million by mid-2025.

Educational platforms have been particularly hard hit. Learning platform Chegg reported a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic between January 2024 and January 2025, prompting the company to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google.

A UK study measuring the impact on news publishers found that when AI Overviews is present, publishers witness a drop of 47.5% in clickthrough rate on desktop, and 37.7% on mobile.

The research concluded that AI Overviews penetration on both devices averages 12.2%, with health and horoscope content seeing 50% AI Overviews penetration.

Some publishers have been forced to close entirely. The travel blog The Planet D shut down after its traffic dropped 90% following Google’s introduction of AI Overviews. Helen Havlak, publisher of The Verge, warned that the extinction-level event is already here, and a bunch of small publishers have already gone out of business.

The Winners and Losers

Not all publishers are losing equally. Fashion, travel, DIY, and cooking websites have experienced declines in traffic, with some reporting up to a 70% drop. Informational content—how-to guides, educational material, and explainer articles—has been hit hardest because AI Overviews excel at synthesizing this type of information.

However, some patterns offer hope. Being included in an AI Overview dramatically increases traffic for lower-ranked pages, with these pages experiencing traffic spikes of up to 3.6 times their normal clicks simply by appearing in an AIO.

Searches that included branded keywords saw CTR increases of nearly 19% with AI Overviews, while non-branded searches dropped by almost 20%. Publishers with strong brand recognition are more insulated from the AI Overview impact.

The shift has created a perverse incentive structure. For transactional searches, websites selling products or services benefit the most, with AIO-included pages seeing a 3.2x traffic increase. Commerce, rather than information, is being rewarded in the new search landscape.

Google’s Response: Quality Clicks, Not More Clicks

Google has defended AI Overviews by arguing they deliver “quality clicks” rather than merely maximizing click volume. Head of Google Search Elizabeth Reid claims there are benefits to citation, including clicks of higher quality, with people spending more time on the sites.

The company also notes that AI Overviews show a greater diversity of websites, opening new opportunities for site owners, creators and publishers. Over 93% of links in AI Overviews come from outside the top 10 search results, potentially democratizing visibility.

However, publishers remain skeptical of these claims, particularly given the lack of transparency. Google’s Search Console doesn’t separate AI Overview clicks from standard organic traffic, so publishers can’t easily see whether changes in performance are related to AI Overviews or other factors.

Former Google executives have offered a more cynical take. One unnamed former senior executive told Bloomberg that giving traffic to publisher sites is “kind of a necessary evil,” with the main thing Google is trying to do being to get people to consume Google services.

The Broader Picture: A Fundamental Restructuring

These trends represent more than temporary disruption—they signal a fundamental restructuring of the internet’s information economy.

According to analysis by Similarweb published by Axios, between May 2024 and February 2025, leading U.S. news sites lost an average of 15% of their traffic from Google.

General search referral traffic has followed a similar trajectory, with traffic to 1,000 web domains dipping from 12 billion global visits in June 2024 to 11.2 billion in June 2025—about a 6.7% decline year over year.

Meanwhile, Google’s search volume continues growing. In 2024 Google surpassed 5 trillion annual searches, marking a 21.64% increase over the previous year. More searches, fewer clicks to external websites—this is the paradox of the AI search era.

The trajectory suggests this is just the beginning. Zero-click searches already made up over 50% of total queries before AI Overviews, and this number is expected to climb toward 70% by mid-2025. Internal testing by Google indicates that AI Overviews could appear in more than 80% of informational queries.

What Comes Next

Publishers are scrambling to adapt. Some are pivoting to brand-building and paywalls rather than relying on search traffic.

Others are optimising specifically for AI citation rather than traditional rankings. SEO directors recommend that publishers track AI citation position, zero-click results that feature their content, and AI-powered referrals, rather than just rank position or traffic.

But the fundamental challenge remains: if publishers want to opt out of AI Overviews, they must opt out of Google Search entirely. There is no middle ground.

For users, the tradeoff is convenience versus quality. AI Overviews deliver instant answers, but those answers are synthesized from the very publishers now struggling to survive.

If the current trajectory continues, the sources that make comprehensive answers possible may not be economically viable much longer.

The death of the blue link isn’t just a change in web design—it’s a restructuring of how information flows online, who profits from it, and what incentives exist to create quality content.

Twenty-five years after Google transformed the internet by ranking the world’s information, it’s now fundamentally questioning whether users need to leave its ecosystem to access that information at all.

The answer Google has settled on—increasingly, they don’t—may solve for user convenience in the short term while creating long-term questions about the sustainability of the open web itself.