AI Search Snatches Clicks: How 'Google Zero' Is Starving Publishers

AI answers, zero clicks

AI-powered search features are increasingly returning full answers on the search results page, so users often get the information they need without clicking through to a publisher’s site. Publishers have dubbed this phenomenon ‘Google Zero’ and are reporting sudden, dramatic drops in referral traffic.

The scale of the impact

Some outlets have seen referral traffic fall by as much as 89 percent, with major outlets like the Daily Mail among the hardest hit. Those lost clicks don’t just reduce pageviews: they hollow out advertising revenue, weaken subscription funnels, and accelerate declines in print and other legacy income streams.

How publishers are responding

News organizations are pursuing several strategies at once. They’re lobbying for more transparency and regulation around AI summaries, filing copyright complaints, negotiating licensing deals with AI firms, and experimenting with their own AI tools. Many are building branded chat interfaces or embedding publisher-controlled AI summaries so readers get contextualized excerpts that keep them on the publisher’s site.

New tools and alternative models

Some companies are trying to turn the problem into a solution. ProRata.ai’s Gist Answers offers a plugin that lets publishers serve AI-generated summaries from the publisher’s domain, giving outlets control over how AI uses their content. ProRata recently raised a $40 million investment to grow that model.

Other services aim to share revenue with publishers. Perplexity’s Comet Plus, for example, directs a portion of a subscription fee back to sources cited by its model, creating a potential path to monetize AI citations.

A pivot toward diversified revenue

Rather than relying solely on search referrals, many outlets are diversifying: subscriptions, newsletters, events, apps, and direct reader engagement are receiving renewed focus. The goal is to build deeper reader relationships and revenue streams that aren’t dependent on third-party search results.

What this means for journalism

AI-driven search is reshaping how news is discovered and monetized. The outlets most likely to endure are those that treat their audience as an engaged community, not just a stream of pageviews. That means investing in trust, unique reporting, membership value, and formats that AI summaries can’t easily replace.

The disruption is urgent and uncomfortable, but it may also force publishers to recalibrate business models and claim more control over how their work is used in the AI era.