What does it mean to rank first on a search engine that no longer sends clicks?
This is not a hypothetical. Ahrefs measured it: when Google places an AI Overview above a search result, the click-through rate for the top-ranked page drops from 7.3% to 1.6%. An 78% collapse. The publisher that did everything right — researched the keyword, wrote the best answer, optimized the page, earned the backlinks, claimed position one — still loses nearly four out of five clicks.
Nobody built the SEO machine more precisely than Dotdash. Under Neil Vogel, the company reverse-engineered Google's intent-matching signals, rebuilt legacy magazine content around search queries, and grew to nearly two billion sessions per year. Then Dotdash acquired Meredith's portfolio of household-name brands, added 40 titles, and created America's largest digital-and-print publisher.
Google's AI Overviews arrived in May 2024. Within eighteen months, People Inc's Google traffic share fell from 54% to 24%. The company that mastered the algorithm was the most exposed when the algorithm decided to stop sharing.
The Mechanism
AI Overviews work by extracting a publisher's answer, displaying it in Google's interface, and — increasingly — making the link unnecessary. The user gets what they came for. The publisher gets nothing.
The Pew Research Center studied this directly. Without an AI Overview, 15% of searchers click through to a publisher page. With an AI Overview, that drops to 8% — a 47% reduction. Of those who see an AI Overview, only 1% click the citations embedded within it. The links are decorative. Google references the source to seem legitimate; the user never follows.
The result, as Similarweb documented: 69% of all Google searches now end without a single click. In AI Mode — Google's full conversational interface — that number reaches 93%.
The Casualties
| Publisher | Search Traffic Change | Period |
|---|---|---|
| People Inc (Dotdash Meredith) | −56% | Google share: 54% → 24% (2023–2026) |
| HubSpot | −70–80% | Organic traffic, Nov 2024–Q2 2025 |
| Business Insider | −55% | Organic traffic, Apr 2022–Apr 2025 |
| HuffPost | −50% | Search referrals, 2023–2025 |
| Small publishers (avg) | −60% | Google referrals, 2-year period to 2026 |
| Medium publishers (avg) | −47% | Google referrals, 2-year period to 2026 |
| Large publishers (avg) | −22% | Google referrals, 2-year period to 2026 |
| Global publishers (aggregate) | −33% | Chartbeat, year to Nov 2025 |
The pattern is regressive. Small publishers lose the most: −60%. Large publishers lose less: −22%. The biggest brands have some protection — brand-name recognition, type-in traffic, social audiences. But even they are bleeding. And the verticals that Dotdash built its empire on — health, home, food, personal finance — are precisely the categories where AI Overviews appear most aggressively. Health queries trigger AIOs 60.7% of the time. That's Verywell, Health.com, and Verywell Mind — three of People Inc's biggest SEO-dependent properties — getting their answers extracted on six out of ten queries.
The Replacement That Isn't
If Google is sending less traffic, perhaps the AI chatbots are sending more? They are not. ChatGPT accounts for 0.02% of total publisher traffic. Perplexity: 0.002%. The AI companies that licensed publisher content aren't sending users to the publishers — they're doing the same thing Google does, just more explicitly. The licensing fees are a consolation prize for the traffic they take. As I wrote last week: the check is small, and the real value is elsewhere.
Meanwhile, publishers who don't have licensing deals get the worst of both worlds — their content trains the models, the models answer the questions, and the publishers see neither revenue nor traffic.
The Pivot That Arrived Early
People Inc saw this coming. Not perfectly, not in full — no one did. But earlier than most.
In the Q2 2025 earnings call, Vogel disclosed that AI Overviews appeared on 55% of People Inc's associated keywords, up from 35% just one quarter earlier. Google traffic had fallen from 52% to 28% of sessions. But total sessions had grown — from 1.99 billion to 2.2 billion. The company was replacing Google traffic with off-platform distribution, social referrals, and direct audiences.
The numbers tell the story of the pivot:
The Inversion — the strategy of turning media brands into product businesses — exists because Vogel understood that a company dependent on Google traffic was a company dependent on Google's willingness to share. That willingness ended. The 19 brands getting Inversion investment are the ones management believes can survive without it.
The Commons Collapse
Zoom out from People Inc and the view is starker. The information commons that the internet built — publishers create, Google indexes, users find, ads fund — is breaking apart at the seam. Google trained its AI on publisher content, and now uses that training to answer questions without the publisher. The publishers can't refuse (blocking Google means disappearing from search entirely). They can't compete (they don't have an AI). They can sue — and People Inc has, joining Penske Media's antitrust action — but lawsuits are years-long affairs, and the traffic is disappearing now.
The feedback loop is what makes this structural rather than cyclical. As publishers lose traffic, they lose ad revenue. As they lose ad revenue, they cut editorial staff. As they cut staff, the quality of their content declines. As quality declines, the AI models that train on that content produce worse outputs. The information ecosystem degrades recursively — what one researcher calls "epistemic self-consumption." The content commons that made Google's AI Overviews possible is being destroyed by the AI Overviews.
In May 2026, Google responded with cosmetic gestures: "Explore New Angles" links, website previews, a feature letting publishers connect subscriptions to search results. These are rearrangements at the margins. They do not address the fundamental extraction — that Google is taking information created by publishers and delivering it in a format that eliminates the need to visit the publisher.
The Arithmetic
Publishers surveyed by Press Gazette expect an average 43% decline in search traffic over the next three years. One-third plan to block Google from using their content for AI Overviews. Most plan to invest less in traditional SEO. The industry is not adjusting to a new algorithm. It is preparing for the end of a business model.
People Inc has a strategy for this world. It's called the Inversion, and it's a bet that brands can survive without search traffic if they build direct relationships with audiences — apps, subscriptions, products, experiences. Whether that bet works is an open question. What's not open is the diagnosis: the machine that built Dotdash into America's largest digital publisher is systematically dismantling the value it created. The SEO era isn't ending in a crash. It's ending in an extraction — content going in, nothing coming back.