Переходи з ChatGPT ростуть, а трафік падає: новинні сайти рахують втрати
Today, news journalism is not only about finding interesting facts, but also about surviving in the face of digital competition and instability. Search engines no longer guarantee traffic, and users are increasingly asking ChatGPT for news instead of Google.
While the number of such click-throughs to news publishers is growing, it is not enough to compensate for the decline in click-throughs caused by users increasingly getting news directly from AI services or AI-powered search results. Whether artificial intelligence will replace traditional news is a complex question, but the numbers point to obvious changes.
In May 2024, Google launched AI Overviews service. It shows the answer right away in the search results, without forcing you to click on links and go to websites.
Pros data According to Similarweb, the share of news searches that do not lead to a website increased from 56% in May 2024 to almost 69% in May 2025. As a result, organic traffic to US news sites has dropped from more than 2.3 billion visits to less than 1.7 billion.
So, for news publishers, the rapid adoption of AI is a game changer. Visibility in Google search results and proper SEO optimization techniques may no longer be as valuable as they were in the past. After all, even high search rankings now do not lead to as much website traffic as they used to, Similarweb notes.
Against this background, there is a rapid growth of interest in search for news in ChatGPT. Between January 2024 and May 2025, the number of news requests to ChatGPT increased by 212%. At the same time, the number of transitions from ChatGPT to news resources increased from less than 1 million to more than 25 million in a year — 25 times. However, this is not enough to compensate for the losses due to the drop in search traffic.
Reuters, the NY Post, and Business Insider receive the most conversions from ChatGPT — 8.9%, 7.1%, and 6.5%, respectively. In contrast, The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI due to the alleged use of its materials without consent, recorded a modest increase of only 3.1%, although it is still among the top 10 sites in terms of conversions.
The news topics that ChatGPT users are most interested in are finance, stock market, sports, politics, economics, and weather. Analysts suggest that this indicates a change in the model of news consumption: people are not only looking for a quick answer, but also for a deeper understanding of the topics.
Interest in ChatGPT is also growing — the number of users of the mobile app doubled in six months, and website traffic grew by 52%.
In response to the media crisis, Google launched the Offerwall tool. It is available to publishers using Google Ad Manager and allows news sites to introduce alternative monetization. This can be, for example, micropayments or newsletter subscriptions instead of displaying ads. Others are experimenting with paywalls (paid access restrictions). However, in the current environment, many have already been forced to reduce staff or close the project entirely.
Against this backdrop, the words of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the Hard Fork podcast sounded particularly poignant. He admitted that AI will displace some professions, and certain jobs will disappear.
«I do think that there will be areas where some jobs will disappear, or maybe there will be whole categories of jobs that will disappear. And any job that disappears, even if it’s good for society and the economy as a whole, becomes very painful — extremely painful — at that point… in many cases there will be real pain»
Source: techcrunch
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