When actress Sorcha Cusack left the BBC drama Father Brown in January, it made headlines, including for the newspapers owned by Reach, among them The Mirror, and the Daily Express.
But the story did not generate the traction the Reach newspapers would have expected a year ago, or even at the start of the year.
Reach put this down to AI Overviews (AIO) – the AI summary at the top of the Google results page.
Instead of clicking through to the story on a Reach newspaper site, readers were happy with the AI overview.
The feature is a concern for newspapers and other media publishers, who have already seen much of their advertising revenue siphoned off by social media.
In a tough market, readers coming via Google search is a valuable source of traffic.
"A major worry, backed by some individual datapoints, has been that AI overviews would lead to fewer people clicking through to the content behind them, with negative knock-on effects for publishers," says Dr Felix Simon, research fellow in AI and news at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
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