AI Overviews and LLMs Trigger 'Historic Robbery' of Digital Media, Leading to Catastrophic Traffic Loss

The digital publishing landscape is reportedly undergoing a seismic shift, with a new report indicating that many leading technology blogs have experienced a precipitous drop in organic traffic, ranging from 30% to an astounding 90% since their peaks around mid-2022. This downturn is attributed to the widespread adoption of AI Overviews (Google’s SGE), the surging popularity of platforms like Reddit for information, and direct query resolution by large language models (LLMs). According to data shared by Carlos Ortega, several major outlets have been severely impacted: Digital Trends reportedly saw its monthly visits plummet from a peak of 8.5 million to 264,000—a 97% reduction—while ZDNET declined from 7 million to 768,000, and Diverge from 5 million to 790,000. Critics label this phenomenon an ‘historic robbery,’ alleging that tech giants like Google and OpenAI are leveraging vast amounts of journalistic content to train and power their AI without offering fair compensation, directly undermining the economic viability of content creation.

This unsustainable trend is forcing content creators into difficult positions. As organic reach dwindles, publishers face the dilemma of either increasing ad density and resorting to sensationalist headlines—a ‘dog-eat-dog’ cycle that can further degrade user experience—or pivoting towards subscription-based models to sustain operations. A salient example is Ratings.com, a renowned hardware review site known for its meticulous, independent testing. Historically reliant on organic Google traffic and affiliate links, Ratings.com recently announced a revamp of its membership program, placing much of its in-depth data behind a paywall. The company explicitly cited the unsustainability of its previous model, noting decreased organic clicks and the active scraping and reuse of its proprietary test data by AI without proper attribution or compensation. This shift, echoed by a community sentiment that AI is ‘solving’ the problem of ad-laden, low-quality content, paradoxically threatens the very ecosystem that feeds AI, pushing quality information behind paywalls and potentially leading to a ‘worse internet’ for the end-user, who ultimately bears the cost.