By Kimeko McCoy • August 25, 2026 •
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Gone are the days where publishers enjoyed a surplus of search traffic referral. AI bot crawlers have usurped those eyeballs. Publishers, however, aren’t taking the changes lying down.
The degradation of search referral traffic isn’t new. The writing has been on the wall since the advent of AI chatbots. Now, AI features are keeping users on Google’s platforms longer and the Google-publisher value exchange is in free fall.
“AI search is only growing and it’s not going anywhere. That search referral is not coming back,” said Sara Guaglione, media reporter at Digiday. Guaglione recently joined the Digiday Podcast alongside executive editor of news Seb Joseph to discuss publishers’ so-called zero-click future.
