AI Overviews: News Escapes Decline Thanks to Google Discover

Organic Traffic Drops by 42% Since the Launch of AI Overviews

The AI Overviews, those AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results, have not yet been deployed in France. However, in countries where they are active, their impact on publisher traffic is becoming increasingly clear. A study published by Define Media Group, a consulting firm specializing in media audience analysis, presents a quantitative assessment based on Google Search Console data from a panel of 64 sites. The overall findings are severe, but the results also reveal unexpected pockets of resistance.

Before the deployment of AI Overviews, the sites in the Define Media Group panel recorded an average of 1.7 billion organic clicks per quarter (Q1 2023 to Q1 2024). Following the launch of the feature, traffic dropped by 16%, never returning to its previous level.

The situation worsened starting in May 2025, when Google began to expand AI Overviews to over 200 countries and a broader range of queries. Since then, organic clicks have continued to decline each quarter. By Q4 2025, the drop reached 42% compared to the pre-AIO average.

The impact varies by sector. According to data from Ahrefs cited in the study, AI Overviews appear on about 15% of news-related queries, nearly three times less than in fields like health or science. Informational content and practical guides (known as "evergreen") are the most exposed, with a 40% decline over the analyzed period.

Hot News Content Up by 103%

This is the most notable finding of the study. While evergreen content declines, hot news content ("breaking news") has increased by 103% across all Google surfaces (Search, Discover, and Google News) between November 2024 and February 2026.

To understand this exception, one must consider how Google handles news-related queries. When a user searches for an ongoing event (a conflict, a natural disaster, an election...), Google displays a "Top Stories" carousel at the top of the results. This carousel features visual thumbnails that link directly to media articles, bypassing an AI-generated summary.

For now, this carousel remains one of the few spaces on the Google results page that is spared from AI Overviews. Define Media Group puts forward several hypotheses to explain this differentiated treatment:

• News events evolve too quickly for AI models to generate reliable summaries in real-time.
• The stakes for accuracy are higher in hot news, where a hallucination would be immediately visible and could have significant consequences.
• Google may be seeking to protect itself from reputational risks associated with inaccurate summaries on sensitive topics.

Google Discover Remains a Growth Engine for Publishers

While "breaking news" remains stable in traditional Search (up 2% while other content types lose more than 30%), it is Google Discover that drives most of the growth. The personalized content feed has grown by 30% in the studied panel. For the first time in the firm's history, Discover and traditional Search now send an equivalent volume of traffic.

When segmented by content type, the study shows that nearly all of the growth in hot news comes from Discover. This growth saw a marked acceleration following the Core Update in December 2025. Some of these gains were adjusted by the first Discover-specific Core Update, released by Google in February 2026, but news traffic via Discover remains twice its level before December 2025.

These results echo a trend already documented in France. The APIG barometer published in March 2025 showed that Discover had become the primary source of traffic for French media, with a 48.8% increase in 2024. In December 2024, out of 820 million clicks recorded by French publishers, 569 million came from Discover, compared to 189 million from Search.