Publisher Traffic

Blueprint diagram of a Google SERP with an AI Overview box at top, a 38% downward arrow, and twin satisfaction gauges showing identical readings.

The First Randomized AI Overviews Study Pinned the Click Loss at 38%

Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon) ran the first randomized field experiment on Google's AI Overviews, recruiting 1,065 US desktop Chrome users between January and February 2026. Hiding AI Overviews raised outbound clicks from 0.38 to 0.61 per search, a

Blueprint diagram of a news publisher robots.txt file with GPTBot and ClaudeBot lines marked disallowed, beside a chart showing 7% weekly traffic decline.

Wharton Priced AI-Crawler Blocking at 7% of a Publisher's Weekly Visits

A Wharton-Rutgers working paper tracked 30 news publishers from November 2022 through May 2024 and found that blocking AI crawlers cuts a publisher's weekly visits by roughly 7%. The drop showed up in three independent traffic datasets and held inside a Comscore household panel, meaning real humans, not