REVEALED: Google’s news-stealing chatbot is pinching 79% of traffic from real journalists – foxglove.org.uk
29.07.2025
New research has found that Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) could result in news publishers losing more than three quarters of their internet traffic from people searching for news.
Foxglove commissioned this research with Authoritas, as part of our international legal challenge to Google’s wholesale theft of the news.
As we’ve said before, when someone searches for a new story on Google in 2025, instead of fetching the results and sorting them into the familiar list of blue links, like they used to do, Google will now often serve an AIO at the top of the page instead.
Google’s AI chatbot Gemini creates AIO by “scraping” (stealing) the work of actual reporters who have done the real work of reporting on the story, then regurgitating it into a zombified summary that often includes new errors or misinformation not present in the reporting it was stolen from.
Google’s grand news larceny gets even worse, because it not only steals the work of professional human journalists, but then the souped-up autocompleted parody it churns out pushes the blue links to the real reporting down the page “below the fold”. That makes it much less likely those links get clicked on.
This research is evidence of just how bad the effect of that final point is on news publishers. Many independent news publishers rely on advertising, in part or entire, to keep the lights on and the press humming.
In other words, by stealing 79% of their clicks, Google isn’t just nicking human reporters’ work and presenting it as its own – it’s stealing the clicks that helped pay for that work in the first place.
That represents a serious long-term threat to the press ecosystem as we know it.
The existence of those stories – and the reporters who investigate and write them – is essential to the basic functioning of democracy.
That’s why we’re bringing this case, across multiple jurisdictions.
In the UK, we’re calling on the CMA to take urgent action to stop Google AIO murdering our independent press.
The critical change that’s needed is to give news publishers the ability to opt out of Google’s chatbot’s “scraping.
It sounds obvious, but as it stands, every news publisher has to make a deal with the devil to appear online at all.
In order to be listed in Google’s 90% monopoly share of the global search market, aka the front page of the internet, they must also agree to have their work stolen and cannibalised by Gemini for AIO. Opt out of that and you basically opt out of existing online at all.
That is a flagrant abuse of Google’s monopoly power, pure and simple. It is not only anti-competitive but makes our online world duller, blander, more boring, less interesting, less informed – and less safe.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Regulators in South Africa and the United States have already called for new publishers to be able to opt of Google stealing their work – but, crucially, still being allowed to appear in its search indexing.
If competition regulators across the globe work together to push this together, we can force Google to back down and give news publishers the right to opt out. Then if individual news outlets choose to licence their reporting to Google, they can negotiate a fair deal for compensation, without the threat of being put out of business if they can’t make one.
For all the updates on this work as they come in, hit the button below:
+44 (0) 7355 982 145
info@foxglove.org.uk
press@foxglove.org.uk
Foxglove Legal (Foxglove) is a UK registered non-profit community interest company. Company number: 12052097.
You can view our data policy here. You can view our complaints procedure here.
If you would like to be added to our press list and be in receipt of our press releases please email press@foxglove.org.uk.
