New Reporting from WSJ is sounding the alarm on AI search, and what that means for the Open Web
A new Wall Street Journal investigation has surfaced what many in publishing already feel: traffic is disappearing. Fast.
According to the report, Google’s AI Overviews — click-free search results generated by its Gemini LLM — are rolling out across millions of queries. These AI summaries often surface full answers without a single click to source websites. The result? Publishers are watching their audience erode.
“The rapid development of click-free answers in search ‘is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated,’” said William Lewis, publisher and CEO of The Washington Post.
The Wall Street Journal also reports that:
At the New York Times, the share of traffic coming from organic search to the paper’s desktop and mobile websites slid to 36.5% in April 2025, down from almost 44% just three years ago.
This drop is another indication of the structural shift we’re seeing across the web. The dominant model of web navigation and discovery is being redefined — away from sites and toward AI systems trained on those very sites’ content.
What’s really at stake
The underlying issue here isn’t just about lost clicks. It’s about disintermediation — where content is extracted, summarized, and monetized by AI platforms with no direct connection back to the original source.
Publishers are left with shrinking visibility, fewer advertising opportunities, and diminished incentive to invest in the creation of public-interest reporting, investigative journalism, or any form of content that relies on sustained audience engagement.
The transition from “link economy” to “inference economy” is well underway. And it’s not just happening via search engines. AI agents, voice assistants, LLM-native browsers, and increasingly autonomous AI workflows are shifting how information is retrieved and used across the internet.
How publishers can respond
Dappier exists to solve this shift — not by fighting the tide, but by helping publishers monetize and participate in the AI-first internet.
Our platform helps media companies become AI-ready in three key ways:
- Syndicate your content directly to AI models through Dappier Marketplace, where you control permissions around your data and monetize at a price per query yo uset.
- Deploy a branded Ask AI answer engine with full editorial control and context awareness — designed to keep users on-site and within your monetizable experience.
- Monetize the agentic web through real-time, contextual ad placements in AI responses, with our Agentic Ads infrastructure.
These tools give publishers the infrastructure to own their place in the GenAI ecosystem — before platforms own it for them.
The status quo is untenable: The AI interface is here, and it’s not going away. But the response doesn’t have to be passive. Forward-looking media companies are already embedding retrieval infrastructure, monetization layers, and direct AI interfaces into their own properties. Do the same:
Make your brand AI-ready now at dappier.com, or schedule a demo today.
