Darren Woolley spent years sharing his expert knowledge of marketing on the web for free.<\/p>\n
Almost overnight, users mostly stopped reading his words.<\/p>\n
“It’s essentially thousands and thousands of hours and years and years of work to generate this content,” Mr Woolley, a former chair of the Australian Marketing Institute, said.<\/p>\n
“Our website had over 3,500 pages of content. We were publishing three times a week.”<\/p>\n
“Then traffic dropped off around 80 per cent.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Australian marketing consultant Darren Woolley. (Supplied: Darren Woolley)<\/p>\n
Mr Woolley’s marketing consultancy is one of many Australian businesses affected by what may be the most significant change to the web in 20 years.<\/p>\n
The open web \u2014 the decades-old global public resource of millions of websites without paywalls, accessible via a standard browser, from news sites to small-business home pages \u2014 appears to be in decline.<\/p>\n
For years, the popularity of social media and the rise of centralised in-app platforms have been eating into the open web’s share of digital ad revenue.<\/p>\n
Now, Google’s pivot to the use of AI-generated answers in search means many websites are reporting significantly fewer visitors, since search users aren’t clicking on source links to the same extent.<\/p>\n
What do Google AI summaries mean for the future of news?<\/a><\/p>\n One year on from the rollout of Google AI Overviews in Australia, exclusive data shows steep year-on-year declines in readership for the top news websites as smaller publishers warn of lay-offs.<\/p>\n This is changing the underlying economics of web publishing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Like many other businesses, Mr Woolley’s consultancy published useful content in order to attract customers to its site via Google search (a technique known as “content marketing”).<\/p>\n But since March this year, Google referral traffic to his website has “dropped off to a fraction of what it was”.<\/p>\n Rubbing salt into the wound, he recognises his own words in the AI summaries (partly trained on his content) that are now choking traffic to his website.<\/p>\n His business now publishes less freely available content.\u00a0<\/p>\n Multiplied across the internet, decisions like his could accelerate the open web’s decline.<\/p>\n Is the open web in decline?<\/p>\n One measure of the open web’s health is its share of online advertising compared to apps, streaming platforms, and all the other places on the internet ads can go.<\/p>\n In 2019, 40 per cent of display adverts purchased via Adwords (Google’s advertising platform, now called Google Ads) were for the open web, according to a recent Google court filing.<\/p>\n By early 2025, that figure had plummeted to just 11 per cent, with apps and streaming platforms mostly making up the difference.<\/p>\n Based on this measure, the open web was struggling.<\/p>\n More stories about AI:<\/p>\n Another metric is the amount of traffic websites are getting \u2014 and this is where the recent switch to AI in search appears to having an affect.<\/p>\n Through this year, Google rolled out AI-generated answers to search queries, so that by the second half of the year over a third of searches in Australia led to an AI summary.\u00a0<\/p>\n Users who encounter a summary are much less likely<\/a> to click on a traditional search result link.<\/p>\n Search traffic to Australian business websites abruptly fell in the second quarter of 2025, having steadily risen for the previous year, according to James Lawrence, co-founder of the Sydney digital advertising company the Rocket Agency.<\/p>\n “There were certain businesses largely unimpacted and certain businesses that were massively impacted,” he said.<\/p>\n The agency’s analysis<\/a> found the vast majority of the summaries were for “informational” type searches (“how do I”, “what is”) rather than transaction ones (“buy shoes”) or specific and targeted research.<\/p>\n “If you google how to fix a leaking tap, you’ll see an AI overview. But if you search for best plumber in my suburb, you won’t,” Mr Lawrence said.<\/p>\n “Businesses’ websites that previously generated large amounts of traffic through content marketing have found that the traffic has almost evaporated if an AI Overview exists.<\/p>\n “I think we’re seeing the biggest change to digital since the popularisation of Google.”<\/p>\n Elliot Dean, director of Temerity Digital, a Melbourne-based web strategy agency, witnessed Overviews having a similar impact on some clients’ sites.\u00a0<\/p>\n “For pages appearing in search results with an AI Overview, click-throughs have dropped 15\u201370 per cent,” he said.<\/p>\n Some publishers of news content also saw sharp falls in traffic<\/a>.<\/p>\n In a statement to the ABC, a Google spokesperson said the company continued to send “billions of clicks to websites every day” and that its “AI experiences” were built to highlight rather than replace the web.<\/p>\n “We care about this deeply, and are confident that we’ll continue to deliver traffic to the web,” the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n Will Google keep going with AI search?<\/p>\n The same pattern has been repeated in other countries with the rollout of AI search tools.<\/p>\n “It’s pretty brutal,” Kevin Indig, a US search engine optimisation (SEO ) expert with clients around the world, said.<\/p>\n “We’re seeing drops in traffic of 50 per cent.”<\/p>\n The fortunes of People Inc, the largest digital and print publisher in the US, with titles like Food & Wine and Better Homes & Gardens, illustrates business’ changing relationship with Google.<\/p>\n Several years ago, Google accounted for 90 per cent of traffic from the open web to People Inc websites. The tech company was integral to the publishers’ success.<\/p>\n Now that figure is in the “high 20s”, People Inc CEO Neil Vogel said at a tech conference in September.<\/p>\n He now sees Google as a competitor, rather than a partner.<\/p>\n Google is unlikely to reverse its pivot to the use of AI in search.<\/p>\n