Traffic Withheld: How Search Design Undermines News Revenue

Spotlight 

1. Zero-click by design: Search engine features are being built to retain users, not sending them to publishers.
2. Publishers subsidise platforms: News generates trust and engagement that platforms monetise without sharing proportionately.
3. AI is accelerating the squeeze: Generative AI refers almost no traffic back to news publishers, stressing revenue streams.
4. Regulation is overdue: Voluntary arrangements have failed; the question is what form intervention takes.

 Introduction

In the digital economy, human attention has become a commodity — captured, analysed, and traded by platforms and advertisers. News content is central to this ecosystem, as it drives frequent and habitual engagement more effectively than most other forms of media. However, even as consumption of online news has surged, the organisations that produce it have become increasingly financially precarious. This paradox characterises the crisis facing contemporary journalism, particularly in resource-constrained economies of the Global South.

At the core of this crisis is the phenomenon of “zero-click” searches, in which the economic value generated by news is captured by search platforms rather than flowing to the journalists and organisations that produce it. A “zero-click” search occurs when a user’s query is answered directly on the search engine results page (SERP) — through news snippets, Top Stories carousels, or AI-generated summaries—without the user ever visiting the source website. Over time, these features have been deliberately expanded to maximize user retention on the platform, thereby eroding the traffic and advertising revenue that news publishers depend on. Drawing on the Competition Commission South Africa’s (CCSA) Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI) report as a case study, this article argues that Google Search’s design choices — which give it 95 percent of South Africa’s search market — constitute a broader, systemic threat to news publishers across the Global South seeking to monetise their work.

Scaling Zero-Click Search Consequences

To stay visible online, publishers invest heavily in search-engine optimisation (SEO) — the craft of making content easier for Google to find, rank, and display. That means choosing the right keywords, structuring articles in ways algorithms reward, and minimising anything that might slow a page down. The measure of success is simple: how often users click, and how long the article stays near the top of the results page.

However, the introduction of AI summaries, snippets, and other features of search engine results has disrupted online news distribution, and the damage falls disproportionately on local and national publishers that lack the resources to continually overhaul their editorial and monetisation strategies. South Africa provides a stark illustration of this effect: only 36–37 percent of Google searches now result in click-throughs, down from 54 percent in 2016. Put another way, around 60 percent of Google searches end without a click — meaning the user got what they needed from the results page itself. Microsoft Bing’s equivalent figure is noticeably lower, at between 30 and 40 percent, suggesting that how much information a search engine chooses to display is very much a design decision, not an inevitability. The MDPMI, South Africa’s market inquiry, rightly attributes this gap partly to design choices governing how much information search engines display on the results page. Another consumer survey reinforced the point: users’ primary reason for not clicking through was that headlines and snippets already provided sufficient information.

Where snippets offer a narrow window into an article — enough for users to decide whether to click — large language models (or AI chatbots) can generate comprehensive answers drawn from multiple sources. In other words, the only users who still click through are those who feel the need to verify the source of the information. 

The market report further notes that, unlike news apps or traditional media, major platforms keep all the advertising revenue generated on their results pages — the ads users see before, between, or alongside search results — without passing any share of it to the news publishers whose content made those results worth reading. These are sometimes called interstitial ads — and for publishers, they represent revenue generated directly from their work that they will never see.

Generative AI is compounding the problem. In 2024, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity collectively referred just 0.3 percent of their South African traffic to news publishers. Where snippets offer a narrow window into an article — enough for users to decide whether to click — large language models (or AI chatbots) can generate comprehensive answers drawn from multiple sources. In other words, the only users who still click through are those who feel the need to verify the source of the information.  For most, the answer on the screen is enough. To address this, AI companies are signing licensing deals with major global publishers.

Table 1. Global South Publishers with AI Licensing Deals as of February 2026

Sources: OpenAI, Perplexity, Tekedia

However, African organisations have been largely excluded from such arrangements. If left unaddressed, the cumulative effects of the loss of referral traffic and the lack of compensatory frameworks may force news SME publishers to end up relying solely on fundraising directly from consumers, private philanthropy, or private-sector investors which may have detrimental effects on the integrity and public service nature of news.

The User Convenience Defence

The design choices behind search result pages were not made unilaterally by platforms; rather, they were iterated based on user feedback. The CCSA survey supports this: approximately 66 percent of South African users considered snippets an efficient, time-saving feature for determining whether a web page warranted a click, while also helping them avoid paid subscriptions. However, as the MDPMI report notes, these same design choices function as a business strategy that keeps users circulating within Google’s own family of products — YouTube, Google Maps, Google Images — rather than visiting independent websites. This self-enclosed ecosystem is sometimes called a “walled garden”: a space designed so that once entered, users rarely need to leave.

Zero-click searches place user convenience and publisher sustainability in direct tension.

This is the core dilemma of zero-click searches. By and large, arguments against the anti-competitive practices of search engines are warranted. However, design choices that make search result pages more content-rich cannot be categorically condemned if they deliver genuine value to users. Zero-click searches place user convenience and publisher sustainability in direct tension. Users benefit from information-rich results pages; the collective outcome, by contrast, is the progressive defunding of the institutions — particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — that produce that information in the first place.

Search Funds News, News Doesn’t Fund Search

There is a deeper imbalance at work: the credibility and audience loyalty that journalism earns flows directly to the platforms that distribute it, not back to the newsrooms that created it. Studies of viral news on Facebook and YouTube show that sudden news events boost user engagement and reactivate collective attention on platforms, even if the effect is often short‑lived. News content, in other words, drives significant value for platforms, but that value is not reciprocated. While publishers build trust and retention for these platforms through resource-intensive breaking news coverage, they are simultaneously forced to compete in an increasingly saturated digital market against better-resourced international organisations.

The economics compound the problem. The ephemeral nature of online media demands content within ever-shorter timeframes, increasing workload and resource expenditure for publishers and driving cost-cutting measures. Yet even after lending their trust and institutional credibility to platforms, publishers receive little compensation beyond referral traffic to match resource expenditure. This asymmetry may be a natural consequence of digitization, but the value of preserving a diverse news ecosystem as a public good demands more than passive acceptance.

Future of News in the Digital Age

Beyond shifts in user consumption patterns, the structural extraction of value from news publishers represents a market failure hiding in plain sight. Platforms progressively reduce the traffic they send to publishers while continuing to benefit from the trust and engagement that quality journalism generates—a divergence of incentives that will not self-correct. Remedies being debated across jurisdictions; revenue-sharing frameworks, algorithmic transparency, formal negotiating rights, reflect a growing recognition that voluntary arrangements have failed. Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code demonstrates that regulation can rebalance asymmetric negotiations. The question is no longer whether intervention is warranted, but whether it will arrive in time. The deeper dilemma remains: publishers must stay visible in ecosystems they do not control without surrendering the autonomy that makes their journalism worth finding. A search infrastructure engineered to answer questions without compensating those who investigate them will, eventually, exhaust the journalism it depends upon.

Siddharth Yadav is a Fellow in Emerging Technologies at ORF Middle East.