Polish news sites lose less Google traffic than American outlets

American publishers are losing more than 80 percent of their Google search traffic within a year in some cases, since the company began inserting AI-generated answers into search results. Data collected for the Polish market by research firm Mediapanel shows a different picture: there is a decline, but it is much milder, and some commentators say Polish users have already learned to skip AI Overview summaries and go straight to classic search results.

The data analyzed by wirtualnemedia.pl covers search traffic to the twenty largest Polish domains with journalistic content, including interia.pl, onet.pl, wp.pl, gazeta.pl, fakt.pl, tvn24.pl and se.pl. It shows that average monthly search traffic in 2024 stood at 800-850 million page views, with a temporary spike to 1.1 billion in May 2025 tied to the presidential election campaign. Only in November and December 2025 did traffic fall clearly below 2024 levels.

Scale of the problem in the US

By comparison, the American market is recording declines that newsrooms describe as existential. According to data cited by the Nieman Journalism Lab, organic Google traffic between June 2025 and June 2026 fell 23 percent for Politico, about 25 percent for CNN, nearly half for USA Today, and more than 85 percent for Business Insider. Outlets such as USA Today, Politico, The Economist, People Inc. and Reuters are openly questioning whether it still makes sense to keep working with Google.

Reddit faces a similar dilemma, weighing whether to cut off Google's access to its forum content. A licensing deal worth $60 million a year, signed in 2024 and allowing Alphabet to train its Gemini models on Reddit posts, is nearing renewal, and the company's leadership is asking why it should keep handing over authentic discussions to a system that, in return, cuts off visitor traffic.

Why Poland looks different

The key difference is the scale of AI Overview's presence in search results. The Senuto report from November 2025 shows the feature appears in just under 29 percent of queries in Poland, covering about 15 percent of search volume, and mostly for so-called evergreen queries, meaning general questions unrelated to current events. That means AI Overview is practically absent from the news-related queries that news sites depend on.

A second factor may be user behavior itself. Commentators cited by wirtualnemedia.pl suggest that Polish internet users, after their first encounter with an AI summary, learned to skip it and go straight to the classic blue links leading to publishers' sites. This pattern limits the so-called zero-click effect, where a user gets an answer directly in the results and never visits the source.

It mainly shows up in searches for so-called evergreens - comment cited by wirtualnemedia.pl based on the Senuto report

Google defends its position

Global figures show Google is still growing despite competitive pressure from AI assistants. Daily search traffic rose 4 percent year over year in June, to 2.8 billion visits, and Gemini became the second-largest source of traffic referred from AI chatbots to outside websites, overtaking Perplexity. Analysts at BofA Securities maintain a buy rating on Alphabet stock, expecting earnings per share to grow roughly 24 percent year over year in the second quarter.

This shows Google is trying to satisfy users' appetite for quick AI-generated answers while also keeping traffic flowing to third-party sites, including by adding clickable blue links inside the AI Overview summaries themselves. For publishers, that is a partial fix. It does not restore traffic to pre-AI levels, but it softens the sharpest declines.

What this means for Polish publishers

For Polish online newsrooms, the Mediapanel data is cautiously good news, though not a reason for complacency. Search traffic still accounts for roughly a quarter of all visits to leading portals, so even a moderate decline translates into real money from ad revenue tied to page views. At the same time, AI Overview's footprint in Poland is growing month by month, and Google is steadily rolling out its AI Mode to more markets, so the current advantage over the US market could shrink.

Publishers that have invested in unique content, analysis and investigative journalism that is hard for AI to summarize in a few sentences may be better positioned than outlets that rely mainly on simple news articles a language model can easily condense. That is an argument for treating the gap between the Polish and American markets as a temporary lag rather than lasting immunity.