BNT AI Partners Blog
USA Today lost nearly half its Google traffic this year. Business Insider lost more than 85 percent. Here's why that's a media-company problem, not a small-business problem, and what to actually do about it this week.
USA Today's organic traffic from Google fell by almost half over the past year. Business Insider lost more than 85 percent of its Google traffic. Politico is down 23 percent. These are not small companies with weak SEO. These are some of the biggest names in media, and they are all having the same conversation right now: is it worth letting Google crawl our sites anymore.
The Wall Street Journal reported that USA Today, Politico, Reuters, The Economist, People, and even Reddit are seriously considering cutting off Google's crawler. The reason comes down to one thing: AI Overviews answer the question right there on the results page, so fewer people ever click through to the source.
A Pew Research study backs this up. Searches without an AI Overview get a click on a traditional link about 15 percent of the time. Add an AI Overview and that number drops to 8 percent. Clicks on a link inside the AI summary itself happen in only 1 percent of searches. USA Today CEO Mike Reed put it bluntly.
"It's time to take a stand and say enough is enough." — Mike Reed, CEO, USA Today
Google's response is that its AI features still send billions of clicks to websites every week, and the company has started paying more than 200 publishers directly for AI access. Both things are probably true at once. Google can be sending huge total traffic across the web while individual publishers still watch their own numbers collapse.
While publishers were threatening to wall themselves off, Yelp did the reverse. On July 23, Yelp signed a licensing deal handing OpenAI access to 330 million reviews and more than 8 million business listings, so ChatGPT can pull real Yelp data when someone asks for a local recommendation. The deal is non-exclusive, Yelp branding and links show up in the responses, and Yelp is extending its Request a Quote feature so ChatGPT users can contact a business without ever leaving the chat.
Two companies, two completely different reactions to the same shift. One is trying to keep AI out. The other is feeding it on purpose, in exchange for staying visible inside it.
You are not USA Today, and your traffic was never dependent on Google's mercy in the same way a newsroom's is. But the pattern underneath this fight still applies to you, and it is worth taking seriously.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Overview "who's a good plumber near me" or "best marketing agency for a small business," the AI is not reading your website line by line and forming an opinion. It is pulling from a handful of sources it already trusts: your Google Business Profile, Yelp, industry directories, and structured content it can lift a clean answer from. Yelp just became a bigger piece of that puzzle for local intent. If your Yelp profile is thin or outdated, you are handing that visibility to a competitor with a better one.
This is the honest version of what's happening. The publisher fight is a huge story for media companies with ad-supported business models built entirely on pageviews. For a small business, the real takeaway is smaller and more useful: the platforms that feed AI directly just got more powerful, and you have direct control over how well yours are filled out. This connects directly to what we cover in how to get AI search to recommend your business.
Start with your Yelp listing. Fill in every field, upload real photos, and make sure your service categories actually match what you do, because that listing may now be a direct input into how ChatGPT describes your business to a stranger. Then check your Google Business Profile the same way. Wrong hours, a dead phone number, or a stale category is the kind of small detail that keeps you out of an AI answer entirely — the same gaps we walked through in how Google's AI search update changes where your business shows up.
Do not block AI crawlers on your own site out of fear that "AI is stealing my content." That instinct makes sense for a newsroom that sells subscriptions and ad impressions off pageviews. It does not make sense for a business that makes money from leads and bookings. You want AI systems reading your site, not locking them out.
Last, don't panic about "Google traffic is dying" headlines you'll see this week. That story is about the economics of digital publishing, not about whether your plumbing business shows up in local search. The businesses that will lose visibility here are the ones with thin, outdated, or inconsistent listings across the platforms AI actually pulls from. That's a fixable problem, and it's one most small businesses have never bothered to fix properly.
AI Overviews answer search questions directly on the results page, which has cut click-through rates on traditional links from around 15 percent to 8 percent according to Pew Research. Publishers like USA Today and Politico have watched their own Google referral traffic drop by double digits over the past year and are questioning whether letting Google crawl their sites is still worth it.
Yelp signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement on July 23, 2026 giving OpenAI access to 330 million reviews and more than 8 million business listings. ChatGPT can now pull that data directly when answering local business questions, with Yelp branding and links included in the response.
Probably not in the same dramatic way it's affecting national publishers, since your traffic isn't built on the same ad-driven, pageview-based model. What matters more for you is whether the platforms AI actually pulls from, like Yelp and your Google Business Profile, are accurate and complete.
For most small businesses, no. Blocking AI access mainly protects businesses whose revenue depends on people staying on their site to view ads. If your business makes money from leads, calls, or bookings, you generally want AI systems able to read and recommend you, not locked out.
Keep your Google Business Profile and Yelp listing complete and accurate, since these are common sources AI pulls from for local recommendations. Make sure your website clearly states what you do, who you serve, and where, in plain language an AI system can lift directly into an answer.
If you're not sure what an AI tool would find if it went looking for your business today, the free assessment is a good place to start. We check your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, and your website against what AI search actually rewards, no pitch, just a real look at where you stand.
Get your free assessment