Will the problems facing New Zealand news media never cease? No sooner had they adjusted to a world ruled by ‘clicks’, than that world is faced with the prospect of ‘zero clicks’.
Not long ago, I was watching an electronic tickertape in a newsroom telling brow-beaten staff which of their stories were ‘trending’ online (and, by implication, what was too boring to justify a reporter’s attention). In another media organisation I saw similar information scrolling across the bottom of newsroom screens. ‘Clicks’ was what it was all about – analytics showing, minute-by-minute, how many people were reading respective news stories on their phones, iPads, or computers.
Some of those ‘clicks’ were directly on news media’s own websites and apps. Many more, however, were through intermediary search engines. The undisputed leader of search was Google. It even went beyond search by proactively looking for the topics that interested you and feeding relevant stories to you via Google Discover.
For some people, Discover became their only source of news. It was convenient and, because it targeted specific areas of interest, it was material they wanted to see and read. Some news media organisations saw that as a helpful way of reaching an audience and came to rely on it for ‘clicks’. A shame, of course, about all those stories that people should know about, but which sat outside their personalised search algorithms.
Then along came Generative AI and speculation that services like ChatGPT would smash Google’s dominance. The soothsays did not, however, reckon with the ingenuity and strategic skills of the people at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The headquarters of Google’s parent, Alphabet, went into overdrive to head off the generative AI newbies before they could establish a ruinous foothold.
The result was Google’s AI Overviews, which was rolled out to 100 countries last year.
You have probably seen the result, perhaps without realising what it was. You simply read it and thought: “Gee, that’s a useful summary”. So useful, in fact, that you didn’t bother clicking on any of the search results below it.
Overviews is one of a suite of products driven by Alphabet’s own generative AI platform, Gemini. It produces AI-powered summaries of search results that provide quick overviews of topics within Google Search. Launched in May 2024, they aim to deliver faster, more comprehensive search results by presenting key information and relevant links in a concise format. That, incidentally, is exactly how Overviews describes itself in the overview atop the results of a search on the topic. I didn’t need to look any further and certainly did not need to bother with clicking on a web address.
And therein lies the terrible problem now facing news media.
The Guardian recently reported the results of a study that found AI search summaries like Overviews had caused up to 80 per cent fewer click-throughs than in the past. A second study cited by the British newspaper stated that, in a survey of 69,0000 Google searches, users only clicked a link under the AI summary once every 100 searches.
Google has responded to such research by saying the methodology was flawed and, in any case, Google was supplying what it described as “higher click quality” (which presumably means those who do click on a website stay there a little longer). The reaction to Google’s statement has been blunt: One analyst stated that Google needed to stop the bullshit and admit that Overviews and its other AI products were causing drops in traffic to a number of sites.
The evidence is there.
MailOnline (the digital presence of the UK’s largest audited circulation newspaper the Daily Mail) has stated that its click-through rates had dropped by 56.1 per cent on the desktop and 48.2 per cent on mobiles. News Corp has blamed The Sun’s falling website traffic for a decline in advertising revenue, with online visibility at a third of its level three years ago. The Mirror is at 20 per cent of visibility level it had in January 2022.
In the United States, William Lewis, the Washington Post’s publisher and chief executive. said the rapid development of click-free answers in search “is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated”. At the New York Times, the share of traffic coming from organic search to the paper’s desktop and mobile websites slid to 36.5% in April 2025 from almost 44% three years earlier. The Wall Street Journal’s share of overall traffic has dropped from 29 per cent in 2022 to 24 per cent this year.
Meanwhile, Google’s AI Overviews is going from strength to strength. The Wall Street Journal says that, through it, Alphabet is winning against the AI upstarts trying to lay siege to its search engine. The company reported in its latest quarterly update that Overviews now has more than two billion monthly users, compared with 1.5 billion in the previous quarter.
So what can news media in this country – or elsewhere for that matter – do to combat this new threat?
The Washington Post Company is looking to some of the audiences it might have been neglecting and that is not a bad strategy. Too many news organisations have fallen for various forms of digital seduction. Whether it was the attraction of shiny objects, the attraction of youth, or submission to the will of a multinational dominatrix, news organisations fell head over heels. As a result their strategies became almost wholly reactive. Looking to lost audiences may also be reactive but it stands a better change of success than looking for new horizons.
Audiences have been lost for a number of reasons, not least pandering to click-based content instead of values-based selections. The needs of older audiences have been overlooked in the pursuit of elusive younger audiences (and that older audience is less dependent on search engines). Journalism that meets needs rather than desires – material that actually helps us lead out daily lives – is in increasingly short supply. There are news avoiders whose anxiety levels were heightened by the pervasive presence of negative news to the point where they stopped accessing the news in any form. All of these audiences are recoverable.
When they are ready to defy governments, it is unrealistic to expect the likes of Alphabet to listen to the voices of news media minnows in a small country like New Zealand. Collectively, however, the news media of democratic nations can make themselves heard to governments and international bodies.
Generative AI’s large language models have trampled concepts of intellectual property rights into the ground. Those LLMs have already done their scraping so there is no turning back the clock. Rather, asserting copyright should lead to significant financial compensation for every database and archive that has been invaded. Similarly, search engines should pay a percentage of their considerable advertising-generated income to the sources on which they rely.
Google is facing anti-trust suits in the United States and has already been found to have monopolies in search and online advertising technology. The resolution of those actions may see the behemoth’s power reduced but it may not solve the AI-based problem now facing news media.
Those outlets need to find ways to lessen their reliance on Google and its derivatives. For example, The UK Press Gazette reported last week that 68 per cent of Google traffic to its network of almost 2000 news and media websites around the world now passes through Google Discover. That puts too many of the outlets’ digital advertising revenue eggs in one basket. They need to find ways to diversify access and to lessen their overall reliance on search.
The answers must lie in alternatives. The media organisations certainly cannot beat Alphabet/Google at its own game – not when the corporation has already increased its defensive capital expenditure from $US75 billion to $US85 billion this year, with the promise of further increases next year. Media need to look at better ways of using what is available.
Some of that will be a back-to-the-future approach but will any other media try to emulate one of News Corp’s planned moves?
Rupert Murdoch’s empire announced last week that it intends to launch what is effectively a West Coast edition of the New York Post. The California Post will begin publishing early next year. There will be a daily print edition and it will also publish across multiple other platforms, including video, audio and social media.
Reaction to the announcement that someone was actually starting a newspaper was met with surprisingly positive comments. The Washington Post quoted Ken Doctor, a veteran media analyst, as saying the New York Post’s strategy makes some business sense.
“It’s an opportunistic company. They’ve looked for niches,” he said. “And the L.A. news scene has fractured increasingly over the last half decade. With a relatively small investment they can increase the amount of audience they have in L.A. and satisfy advertisers. You just need a small, fractional audience to make it work, especially if you keep your editorial costs low.”
Mr Doctor makes it sound so easy.
We will have to wait to see if the new paper can come up with headlines as memorable as its New York parent’s incomparable “Headless Body In Topless Bar”.