“Google Zero” arrived for Phillip Swan, and it killed his successful online business.
The term, coined by The Verge’s Nilay Patel, describes a future web where Google stops sending traffic to publishers. Increasingly, it feels like that time is nearing for publishers across the news industry.
It certainly arrived for Swan. A journalist covering the television industry since the early 1990s, Swan launched TV Answer Man in 2017 to offer simple and clear guidance to viewers about emerging technologies, such as 4K and streaming. In September 2023, the site was doing well, garnering about a million page views a month and advertising revenue surpassing $20,000 a month. Upwards of 70% of the traffic came via Google queries, Swan said.
Then, Google began making changes to its algorithm. A decline in traffic happened immediately, but it became more drastic as the months went on. Now, all the top queries Swan’s site use to rank highly for go to AI Overviews or threads on Reddit, which has benefited greatly after agreeing to a data licensing partnership with Google in 2024.
“It became obvious to me that my previous traffic numbers would never return unless Google decided to change its algorithm, which it did not,” Swan said. “In fact, it leaned in even more so by popping AI answers atop of site links. It was just a matter of time before I would have to stop publishing, which I basically did a month ago.”
These days, traffic to TV Answer Man’s website has dropped below 50,000 pageviews a month. And Swan, like many publishers, hasn’t even been able to speak to someone at Google directly about the loss of his livelihood. Google helped him build his business, and now it has quietly destroyed it. And he’s not alone.
A recent analysis by Growtika, a SEO marketing firm, revealed organic search traffic to major tech publishers dropped 58% since 2024. Among those was The Verge, which went from 5.3 million organic visits in February 2024 to just 790,000 visits in January 2026.
Smaller publishers with 10,000 daily pageviews or less have been hit even harder by Google’s shift to AI Overviews. According to an Axios analysis of data provided by Chartbeat, organic search traffic to smaller publishers plummeted 60% over the past two years, while the drop at larger publishers was around 47%.
Google isn’t just part of the business — for web publishers, it is the ball game.
Controlling around 90% of the online search marketplace means Google has extraordinary power to shape the futures of businesses worldwide, including news publishers trying to connect relevant, fact-checked information to readers.
In essence, the internet is built around the idea Google will send your website traffic if you allow it access to your information and provide content its users are looking for. As SFGATE columnist Drew Magary recently pointed out, that partnership is on its last legs.
“Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them,” Magary wrote. “Now Google, which is set as the default search engine in nearly every piece of tech you consume, is poised to cut off their oxygen supply altogether.”
If some hope remained that organic search traffic might actually rebound — that Google might reverse course — the unveiling of its “intelligent search box” should clarify where the future of search traffic is headed. Spoiler: it’s not going to web publishers.
Just look at the trend line over the past few years — from Top Stories carousels to Discover to AI Overviews and now AI mode. Each step of the way, Google made it easier for users to avoid clicking through to a publisher’s website.
“By the time publishers noticed the scale of the impact, the behavior had already changed,” wrote SEO Sherpa’s Jenny Abouobaia. “Google stopped being a gateway to news sites and became the place people consume news directly.”
In May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat for a lengthy interview with the Decoder podcast, which covered a host of topics, ranging from the tech giant’s current structure to whether publishers should be able to opt out of AI training.
But it was Pichai’s response to complaints about declining search traffic being sent to publishers I thought was the most telling.
Among those sounding the alarm is Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, who said during an interview with TBPN (which, in yet another sign of tech dominance, was recently purchased by OpenAI) he expects search traffic from Google to completely disappear. That’s based on what’s happened over the past three years, where search traffic to the iconic publisher has declined much faster than they’d forecast.
“Last year, I told our teams: assume there’s no search. You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero,” Lynch said. “We don’t expect it to be zero. … We expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic. Very low.”
Pichai rejected Lynch’s premise, but not the argument search traffic will continue to decline to some or most publishers.
“I’m not in a position to tell such an iconic publisher what they should think about their business or plan,” Pichai said. “If they are building content that is high-quality and people like it, I expect us to reflect that in our products. That much I can commit to them.”
“As the technology improves, low-quality clicks get filtered out,” Pichai added. “That’s a natural evolution we see. We see it in our metrics. Bounce clicks are going down.”
These days, reflected in our products means showing up in an AI overview, along with tiny links back to publishers a vast majority of users will never use. Basically, Google is now in the business of giving users an answer to their queries, but not giving publishers the click, low-quality or not.
“Google is openly acknowledging that it’s trying to keep people from going to other information sources. The company wants to be the determining source on ALL topics,” Swan said. “And if that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what would.”
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. You can reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here