Google Has Its Hand Around the Throat of the Independent Media and It’s Squeezing Harder and Harder

Since 2024, Google's AI Overviews and Meta's AI assistant have redirected users from traditional news websites to AI-generated summaries, causing a sharp decline in traffic and revenue for independent media. Visits to the top 100 news sites dropped from over 70 million monthly in mid-2024 to just over 47 million in mid-2026, threatening the viability of many publishers.