In recent months, the evolution of generative artificial intelligence has begun to have a visible—and controversial—impact on the entire digital ecosystem. In particular, the introduction of AI Overview in Google search results has triggered a significant shift in the way users access information online: increasingly, they are no longer clicking on links, but are instead content with summary answers offered directly by AI.
According to data from multiple sources, the traffic to websites is declining: between March and April 2025, Wikipedia lost 6% of traffic, YouTube 2%, and in many other cases clicks from organic search are decreasing dramatically. In an analysis of Wall Street Journal, the share of organic traffic to the New York Times dropped to 36.5%. In parallel, a study by Press Gazette highlighted how over 68% of searches with AI Overview no longer generate any clicks to the original sites.
This trend is causing serious concern in the world of independent information and journalism. A group of publishers, gathered in theIndependent Publishers Alliance, has already filed a formal complaint with the European Commission and the UK CMA, accusing Google of abusing its dominant position and unauthorized exploitation of content to train language models.
The core of the dispute concerns the lack of explicit consent from publishers and the difficulty in opting out of the AI Overview feature without compromising one's visibility in standard results. A dynamic defined by many as “digital blackmail”, which puts the economic sustainability of an entire sector at risk.
Not surprisingly, some tech companies are also reacting. Cloudflare, one of the largest internet infrastructure providers, announced the default blocking of unauthorized AI crawlers and launched a program “Pay Per Crawl”, which allows publishers to charge AI companies for access to their content. This breakthrough aims to restore a balance between innovation and creators' rights.
Despite some positive signs—such as increased traffic from ChatGPT to sites like Reuters, Business Insider, and the New York Post—the systemic risk to the open and pluralistic web is real. The growing centralization of information flows around a few operators raises fundamental questions about copyright, information sustainability, and digital freedom.
As AI continues to evolve and integrate into our everyday tools, it becomes urgent find new rules and economic models that protect both innovation and the cultural and informational pillars of the web.
