This is a mega-story that could change American media forever. AI and modern search engines could be the death of the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post.

Axios reports startling declines in web traffic to the legacy media sites:

By the numbers: U.S. web traffic to roughly 100 of the top news sites fell to 47.6 million visits in July, down from peaks above 70 million in 2024, according to Similarweb data.

While AI-driven referrals are growing, they remain far too small to offset traffic losses from traditional search engines and social platforms…

Context: 2024 marked a traffic peak before the digital tides started turning on publishers.  That was the year Google introduced AI overviews within its search results and Meta rolled out a heavily expanded version of its Meta AI assistant…

Email and affiliate referrals have been the only growth areas for publishers for the past three years… Direct traffic, traditionally one of publishers’ largest funnels, has sunk 25%.