As search engines’ AI summaries cut traffic to media sites, and shrink ad audiences, advertisers need to measure and adapt campaign activities to continue to reach and impact audiences.

A new era: The rise of “zero-click”

The way people use search is changing. With Google’s new AI Overviews, users increasingly get their answers directly on the results page. This means fewer clicks to the underlying websites, the phenomenon widely known as zero-click search.

What might sound like a small shift in user behaviour is actually transforming the economics of online media. For advertisers, it means that the audiences on publisher sites, where premium digital advertising takes place, are getting smaller.

How much traffic is being lost?

Looking at numbers from international studies, the results are stark.

• In the UK, sites ranked first in Google lost up to 79% of their clicks if an AI summary appeared above them.
• MailOnline reported drops of 56% on desktop and 48% on mobile for queries with AI summaries.
• A Pew survey found that when AI summaries appeared, users clicked through only once in a hundred searches.
• In the U.S., some publishers saw 10-17% year-over-year referral declines, while Business Insider reported a 55% loss in organic traffic over three years.

Why advertisers should care

Less traffic to publishers equals a smaller reach for campaigns running in their environments. For years, advertisers have relied on premium news and magazine sites to deliver both scale and quality context. But if zero-click search keeps users on Google, the available ad inventory on those sites inevitably shrinks.

This raises uncomfortable questions:

• Are advertisers still reaching the same audiences through publisher sites as before?
• Does the media mix need to be recalibrated if the open web is losing share to walled gardens and AI platforms?
• Can campaign measurement tools detect and quantify these shifts quickly enough?

Measurement as the missing piece

In many cases, advertisers track impressions and clicks in silos separately for open web sites, social media platforms and online video services. But zero-click behaviour cuts across these silos. A click that “disappears” from a news site doesn’t automatically reappear in another channel—it might simply vanish into the search engine’s ecosystem.

This makes cross-media measurement essential. Advertisers who want to secure sufficient reach among their target audiences need visibility into how the real exposure shifts across platforms. Without this, media allocation risks drifting out of alignment with actual audience behaviour.

The provocative question

So, here’s the challenge: Are advertisers equipped well enough, measurement-wise, to adjust their media allocation as audiences shift, or even shrink, from one platform to another, from one site to another?

If not, the risk is clear: marketing investments may increasingly chase audiences that no longer exist at the same scale.

Zero-click search is more than a technical curiosity. It is a structural change in how people consume information—and therefore in how advertising audiences are formed. For advertisers, the ability to measure, adapt, and reallocate will decide whether campaigns continue to deliver the reach and impact they promise.

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