Google's AI Overviews Gut Publisher Traffic—Yoast Still Peddles Fantasy

• Publishers like The Verge, Wired, and Dotdash Meredith reported 40-60% drops after Google’s AI Overviews launched in the US.
• Yoast’s official blog has no guidance on AI Overviews as of June 2024.
• Google’s Overviews scrape publisher content without meaningful attribution or clicks.

Let’s cut through the cowardice: Google’s AI Overviews are a traffic annihilation weapon, not some “assistive” upgrade, and the numbers prove it. When AI Overviews rolled out to logged-in US users in May 2024, The Verge and Wired both admitted to 50% or greater traffic drops on evergreen content. You’d think this kind of existential threat would have every SEO tool and plugin vendor sounding the alarm, but Yoast—the self-proclaimed king of WordPress SEO—is busy telling its users to “keep focusing on quality content”. That’s not advice, that’s malpractice.

Yoast’s silence is not just an oversight; it’s a business strategy. Search their official blog or support forums as of June 2024, and you’ll find more about green checkmarks and meta descriptions than about AI Overviews. Why? Because Yoast’s entire empire is built on the idea that schema, readability, and keyword hygiene still have leverage over Google’s search stack. This is 2024 cargo-cult SEO: keep pretending the old rules work, don’t mention that AI Overviews never show a plugin badge, and pray your renewals don’t tank before everyone figures it out.

Meanwhile, AI Overviews are a direct, anti-publisher siphon. Google’s LLMs summarize, paraphrase, and repackage content directly in SERPs, and the “Sources” links are buried, unclicked, or missing entirely. Look at anyone’s Search Console in the US for non-brand queries after May 15, 2024. Sessions from Google are down 40-60% on informational content, especially when a competing answer is easily summarized. These aren’t outliers, they’re the new baseline. Yoast, Rank Math, and the rest? Deafening, self-interested silence.

The uncomfortable recommendation: Stop listening to tool vendors who profit from denial. If you depend on Google, your future is about building direct audience relationships—newsletters, apps, memberships—anything that bypasses Google’s extractive LLM layer. The era of tuning on-page SEO for Google’s bots is over. You can’t optimize your way out of being eaten alive by AI Overviews, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a fantasy.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much traffic have publishers lost since Google launched AI Overviews?

Major publishers like The Verge, Wired, and Dotdash Meredith have reported traffic drops ranging from 40% to 60% since the US rollout in May 2024, especially on evergreen and informational content. These are not isolated cases; many smaller publishers see similar trends.

Is Yoast actually doing anything about AI Overviews?

As of June 2024, Yoast has not issued concrete guidance, updates, or position papers on AI Overviews. Their blog and support documentation remain focused on pre-LLM SEO tactics, ignoring the new reality.

Can you optimize your content to appear in AI Overviews?

No. There is currently no reliable way for publishers to “optimize” for inclusion or attribution in AI Overviews. Google’s LLMs synthesize and rewrite content, rarely giving meaningful credit or passing traffic. Traditional SEO signals are effectively bypassed by this new system.