Why is UK news publishers' Google visibility falling despite AI Overviews?

More than two-thirds of the UK's biggest news sites saw their Google search visibility fall in the past year, and that decline is happening at the same time as Google embeds Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews. The two trends are not contradictory: the carousel placement is narrow, conditional and often mutually exclusive with other visibility, so it cannot offset the broader losses from AI Overviews, core updates and domain migrations. Publishers who opt out of generative AI features to protect their content may actually lose the one new placement that still sends them traffic.

What's actually happening

Sistrix data shows more than two-thirds of the biggest news websites in the UK saw their Google search visibility drop over the past year, and the scale varies enormously by title. Press Gazette's analysis found the Mail's domain, dailymail.com, scored 9.99 on 21 October 2026 compared with 32.17 for dailymail.co.uk a year earlier, following the Mail's domain change.

A December 2025 core update made things worse. Of 75 UK news websites analysed, only 23 (31%) saw their visibility score rise, meaning the clear majority lost ground, according to Prolific North's coverage. Even high-visibility brands weren't spared: Reuters dropped 31% and The Telegraph fell 30% in that update, though The Guardian remained the most visible UK news site overall, ahead of Money Saving Expert, The New York Times and The Independent.

Zoom out further and the picture is starker. Prolific North reported that the Mirror has lost 80% of its Google search visibility since January 2022, The Sun is down 67%, and the Mail is operating at less than half its previous visibility. Enders Analysis concluded that "the scale and timing of decline in publishers' visibility across the board strongly points to changes in Google's systems, not publisher intent, as the main driver."

How AI Overviews and Top Stories carousels fit together

Google has been embedding a Top Stories carousel directly inside some AI Overviews rather than showing it as a separate module further down the page. Analysis of over 17 million Top Stories across 30 days found this embedded carousel appears on 15.5% of US news searches that show a carousel, and 17.5% in the UK, with entertainment queries highest at 35.1% in the US, according to Keyword Everywhere's reporting.

A Google spokesperson confirmed to Search Engine Land that the feature is fully live inside AI Overviews for mobile users in the United States and "will expand," though with no committed markets or dates. Eligibility runs at the domain and subdomain level only, so a subdirectory like a /blog path does not qualify, as Digital Applied's coverage explains.

Research covered by Media Copilot found Top Stories appeared either inside an AI Overview or as a standalone module, never both, based on NewzDash's analysis of the carousel's placement patterns. Publishers who opt out of Google's generative AI features risk losing the embedded placement with no guarantee the standalone Top Stories module will reappear elsewhere on the page. For a fuller walkthrough of how that trade-off was introduced, see our note on Google tying the Top Stories carousel to the AI Overviews opt-out.

Why the carousel doesn't offset visibility losses

Nearly half of Google search results pages now carry an AI Overview, according to Semrush's tracker cited by Media Copilot, which means publishers are competing for a narrower slice of attention above the fold. An Ahrefs study published in February 2026 found AI Overviews correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages, nearly double the 34.5% decline the same firm documented in April 2025, as reported by The Next Web.

A randomised field experiment with 1,065 desktop Chrome users, run by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College, found AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8% and raised zero-click searches by 34.5% when the feature appeared, with no measurable improvement in how users rated their search experience, per PPC Land's coverage. That pattern lines up with other recent data on how Google's own figures show AI Mode cutting clicks to publisher websites, and with coverage of how Google has added more links to AI Overviews while still withholding click data.

Against that backdrop, a carousel that shows up on only 15.5% to 17.5% of news searches with a carousel, and never alongside a standalone module, is a thin consolation prize. Chartbeat data covered by Keyword Everywhere found search referral traffic fell 60% for small publishers, 47% for mid-sized publishers and 22% for large publishers over two years, while chatbot referrals grew over 200% but stayed under 1% of page views. The gains aren't close to replacing the losses.

The regulatory backdrop

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to let publishers opt out of having their content used in AI Overviews and AI Mode while preserving standard search rankings, as Let's Data Science explains. CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said: "With features like AI Overviews rapidly reshaping online search, it is crucial that content publishers, including news organisations, have appropriate bargaining power over how their content is used," according to Keyword Everywhere's report. The CMA's own report noted publishers have suffered a traffic drop since AI Overviews rolled out because fewer users click through to original articles, per Barchart's coverage.

But the Top Stories-in-AI-Overviews feature arrived shortly after that opt-out was forced through, and publishers using Search Console's generative AI exclusion control will likely lose eligibility for the embedded Top Stories placement, as Press Gazette reported. The opt-out designed to protect publishers from AI Overviews now also costs them the one placement inside AI Overviews that still drives clicks.

NewzDash founder John Shehata has offered some reassurance for a related but separate control: blocking Google-Extended in robots.txt should not affect AI Overviews or Top Stories eligibility, because the Search Console generative AI exclusion is the switch that actually governs appearance in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative Discover features, per Press Gazette. Readers weighing up robots.txt choices more broadly may find our piece on whether to adopt the shared AI training policy token in robots.txt useful background.

Other forces behind UK-specific declines

Domain migrations are compounding the problem. The Mail's move from dailymail.co.uk to dailymail.com coincided with its visibility score falling from 32.17 to 9.99 within a year, per Press Gazette.

A separate UK publisher's NewzDash visibility score for trending news queries fell from 1-2% to 0.02%, a roughly 98% decline, within two weeks of an overnight .co.uk-to-.com move, with no recovery four months later, according to Relevant Audience's reporting. Shehata calls this the "Google Reset," his own term rather than Google's, describing how drastic site changes like switching CMS, redesigning, or changing domains can wipe out accumulated visibility, with the new domain never picking up what the old one lost, as Search Engine Journal reported.

Meanwhile Substack is gaining the visibility traditional publishers are losing. Substack's search visibility score rose from 13.48 to 27.94 over the same year that most major UK news sites declined, per Press Gazette's Sistrix data.

What publishers and brands should do about it

Our view: treating Top Stories-in-AI-Overviews as a strategy rather than a side effect is a mistake. It's a Google-controlled placement that can vanish from a results page entirely, it excludes subdirectories, and it trades off against the standalone module publishers already relied on. Any publisher deciding whether to opt out should model the eligibility, placement and migration risks together, not just the headline traffic numbers, before acting. If you're assessing your own exposure across Google and AI assistants, Sited's free AI visibility scorecard is a fast way to see where you currently stand.

The limitation here is real: none of this data tells us how Top Stories eligibility interacts with a publisher's broader AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini, only with Google's own surfaces, so any strategy built solely on this carousel is working with a partial picture.

Frequently asked questions

Does opting out of AI Overviews protect a publisher's Google rankings?

Yes. The CMA's order requires that sites opting out keep their standard search rankings unchanged, though they won't receive traffic or impressions from generative AI features, according to Let's Data Science.

Can a publisher block AI training without losing Top Stories placement?

According to John Shehata, blocking Google-Extended in robots.txt alone should not affect AI Overviews or Top Stories eligibility, because that is governed by the separate Search Console generative AI exclusion, per Press Gazette.

Why did the Daily Mail's visibility collapse?

The Mail's search visibility score fell from 32.17 to 9.99 following its move from the dailymail.co.uk domain to dailymail.com, according to Sistrix data reported by Press Gazette.

Is the December 2025 core update to blame for all the losses?

No, it's one factor among several. Enders Analysis pointed to the broader scale and timing of declines across publishers as evidence of systemic changes at Google, not a single update or publisher behaviour, per Prolific North.