Canadian Mainstream Media Outlet Finally Notices AI Overview

It took about a year, but apparently, someone in the Canadian mainstream media finally noticed Google AI Overview.

Over a year ago, I wrote a piece on the threat of Google’s AI Overview. At the time, I noted that the AI answer is pushed to the top of the page, pushing search results down. I pointed out that the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) implications are profound as users are encouraged to get the answer directly off of Google, skipping the idea of clicking on a third party website entirely. I worried that this would lead to substantially less traffic to independent websites.

Back in March of this year, I noted the rumours that Google was looking at pushing an AI only search result with web results being shuffled off to a separate tab which suggested that there would be even more pain for independent websites like ours. At the time, I noted that Freezenet has been experiencing considerable decline in web traffic thanks to AI Overview, proving my previous theory correct.

As it turns out, I wasn’t alone in noticing just how much pain is being experienced on our site. As I recently noted, there is an antitrust lawsuit against Google over this in the US and an antitrust complaint lodged against Google in Europe. I noted that the argument for copyright was ultimately going to be a dead end since it is the wrong tool for the job. The thing is, unless there is something I am missing, the argument for antitrust seems to show some promise in curbing this trend.

While I have gone over the threats of AI Overview for some time, it is an issue that Canada’s mainstream media seemed to be completely missing. That changed today when mainstream media outlet, The Logic, finally took notice of this. I know that they are extremely late to the game here, but to be fair, Canada’s mainstream media has been busy since 2023 losing traffic because they stupidly got themselves kicked out of Meta’s services, so losing traffic on their websites is so par for the course, it’s hard to notice this particular reason why they are losing traffic.

Still, it seems that The Logic finally noticed this happening and seems to be quite alarmed by this development:

If you use Google to search the internet these days, there’s a chance you won’t be served a list of links or news articles. Instead, you may be met with a chatbot’s attempts to answer your query directly on the page. This shift, which the tech giant started rolling out last year, has been subtle but significant. By some measures, Google accounts for over 90 per cent of global web traffic. These changes mean far fewer Google users are clicking through to the original sources the search engine trawls because the information they’re seeking is being delivered directly by AI.

The consequences for the internet as we know it will be profound. For news publishers, they have already been profound. Industry executives are quietly sounding the alarm about “Google Zero,” a term popularized by The Verge’s Nilay Patel to describe the moment when Google stops sending any referral traffic to third-party sites. In conversations with other publishers, I’m consistently hearing about the steep traffic declines they’re already experiencing, particularly over the past quarter.

The numbers bear this out. According to a new report from traffic-monitoring site Similarweb, since the launch of Google’s AI Overviews in May 2024, the proportion of news-related searches that don’t result in any click-throughs to publisher websites has jumped to nearly 69 per cent from 56 per cent. Unsurprisingly, organic traffic—the term for visitors who arrive at a website via search rather than via paid advertising or other such referral methods—has also fallen sharply, dropping from over 2.3 billion visits at its peak in mid-2024 to under 1.7 billion in May 2025.

Now, before we go further, we should note that this was written by David Skok. We’ve known about Skok through the debates of the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. Long story short, he is known for being all ego and no brains. So, it comes as little surprise how hilariously bad his analysis is about all of this.

I’m not an alarmist. I’ve built my career on embracing innovation and adapting to shifts in how people consume news. In fact, The Logic could be one outlet that ultimately benefits from this change because our original journalism stands apart from the commoditized information that chatbots mostly tend to regurgitate.

Yeah, The Logic would benefit from these changes because they are special. They have original journalism and, therefore, wouldn’t be affected by any of this. If anything, they are winning as a result of this. The thing is, The Logic is also indexed by Google. Whatever is present on Google’s index of their site can very easily be analyzed by AI Overview.

Even if your content isn’t indexed by Google, almost no one is going to be sitting there saying that the AI result is there, therefore, they should start using The Logic. They are getting their answers from other sources and moving on. If anything, apart from some advertising that the source seems to use, The Logic is otherwise largely invisible to the wider internet. If anything, AI Overview is going to help make sites like The Logic even more invisible, not less.

One last point is that it doesn’t matter how good your reporting is. It could be the best journalism on the planet and, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t matter. You’re still going to be suffering from the consequences of what AI Overview is doing. At most, you are banking on advertising completely to carry the day which means that you are employing a pay to win aspect with the hopes that advertising will float your website. To put it another way, you are literally shelling out money to a company that created this monster in the first place.

From there, Skok wrote this:

Here in Canada, a group of news publishers, including CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Toronto Star publisher Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press, have sued OpenAI claiming copyright infringement. OpenAI has signed licensing deals with publishers in other countries, but has yet to do so with Canadian publishers. The Toronto Star, as part of a group of major publishers that includes Vox Media and Condé Nast, is also suing Cohere in the U.S. (The Logic is not a party to either lawsuit.)

Again, if you are going after AI companies for reading your material, copyright is a horrendously bad tool to use. This is because reading is not copyright infringement. Summarizing material is also not copyright infringement. Both fall squarely on fair dealing and fair use. If you think that analysis is bad, you don’t have to take my word for it. US judges (since this excerpt references US lawsuits) have ruled time and time again that AI training on freely available material is fair use. The only way you can claim copyright infringement against an AI company is if you can prove that the company pirated paid content and used that material without authorization (As was, so far, the case for the Anthropic ruling). Otherwise, a copyright infringement lawsuit is only going to end in tears for publishers. Trying to argue that copyright infringement is the way to go is little more than wishful thinking.

Skok then wrote this:

The Online News Act, which has at least created a means through which big online platforms offer Canadian publishers some compensation, wasn’t designed to regulate AI scraping or to reckon with how quickly the technology is reshaping the internet.

The Online News Act wasn’t designed with AI in mind. It also wasn’t designed with the internet in general in mind. I’ve beaten this point to death, but to summarize, the Online News Act has resulted in significant losses after Meta dropped news links in Canada. The Google “deal” did little to make up for the losses incurred by Meta’s perfectly reasonable reaction to this law as the money in question wasn’t even all new money, let alone making up for the $230 million in losses. Hey, if Skok wants to argue that the mainstream media punching itself in the face was a brilliant move anyway, despite what reality has to say, well, he can, er, knock himself out.

Of course, the facepalm worthy points made by Skok only continue:

At a minimum, tech platforms should clearly attribute any information their AI tools draw from journalistic work. These tools should cite the original reporting as it is written to avoid hallucinations or misrepresentations that undermine journalistic accuracy. Transparent sourcing will not only encourage the public to trust the accuracy of these tools but also help sustain the ecosystem that produces reliable information in the first place.

There’s two problems with that statement. For one, AI Overview already does that. I’ll repost the screenshots here in this article as well to illustrate my point:

You see those little link icons on the bottom right hand corner of various paragraphs? Those allow you to open a new panel on the side which shows a list of sources AI Overview used to generate that summary. This as opposed to what was happening before where information was advertised:

The differences is profound. The first discourages users from clicking through to third party links. The latter encourages users to click on a third party link. It’s a very big difference and is the cause of so much web traffic loss to third party websites.

The second problem is that AI Overview tends to pull information from Reddit posts. Reddit already has a major deal with Google and that has caused a lot of false information and hallucinations in the first place. Still, one of the primary sources of information is not even a journalism outlet in the first place and there is no way one journalism outlet is going to provide information to all answers asked by users. If anything, Reddit is going to continue being the major source with the way the deals are structured. At most, Skok is praying that his site, The Logic, is going to be replacing Reddit as a source. Spoiler alert: it ain’t happening.

Skok then wrote on how everyone needs reliable information and journalism is where it’s at. First of all, users are clearly relying on AI Overview for answers, replacing journalistic work in the process.

Second, traditional journalism has been in decline for years now. Whether it’s the sources themselves shutting down or the public increasingly concluding that mainstream media sources are not trustworthy, the mainstream media landscape is being eroded from all sides. Just because you exist doesn’t mean that you are invulnerable. Trust me, I’ve had former employers who thought the exact same thing and it ended with their news sources shutting down. Never assume you are invulnerable.

Third, mainstream news outlets have developed an archetype of a standard reader that bears little to no resemblance to what readers actually are. Because of that, they occupy an information space that is increasingly shrinking in potential audiences. As I’ve said in the past, content for all is content for no one. People are diverse with a diverse set of interests. This is a concept that mainstream media simply can’t seem to grasp. What a lot of people are looking up is information that simply isn’t covered by mainstream media. Even when the mainstream media does hit on topics that could connect with audiences, it is frequently written so poorly that it leaves us independent media types to go through the process to correct the record (as I’ve clearly demonstrated above).

While Skok may think his little website is somehow special, the only thing he ultimately demonstrated is that he is completely dependent on advertising from the very organization that is gutting traffic to independent websites. He will increasingly rely on paying for traffic and it’s unclear how sustainable that really is in the long run. After all, Google has already been accused of manipulating ad revenues for both the advertisers and publishers as it is. I can only imagine how much more Google will gradually end up charging advertisers to access its captive audiences in the future. Eventually, I can only imagine it won’t be worth the cost sooner or later.

Still, it is nice to see a Canadian mainstream media finally notice something like this. Even if the analysis leaves a heck of a lot to be desired in all of this, the fact that someone noticed is an accomplishment. So, congrats to The Logic for actually noticing something I’ve been reporting on for over a year now. Hopefully, others will eventually take notice that this is actually a thing worth talking about.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.