When AI Devours the News

The news business has survived many existential threats. Television didn't kill radio. The internet didn't kill newspapers, though it came close. But what happens when artificial intelligence doesn't just compete with journalism but consumes it whole, digests it, and spits out bite-sized summaries without sending a single reader, or penny, back to the source? This isn't a hypothetical future. It's happening now, and the numbers are brutal. When Google rolled out AI Overviews to all US users in May 2024, the impact was immediate and devastating. Travel blog The Planet D shut down after its traffic plummeted 90%. Learning platform Chegg reported a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic between January 2024 and January 2025. The average click-through rate for the number one result on AI Overview keywords dropped from 7.3% in March 2024 to just 2.6% in March 2025. That's not a decline. That's a collapse. Zero-click searches, where users get their answers without ever leaving Google, increas