According to a new report, more than “50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human.” How, even in the AI-obsessed age we live in, could that feasibly be possible? Unfortunately, the statistic starts to make a lot more sense once you identify the culprit, as Gemini’s integration into Google’s search function has led to a “human traffic decline” of almost “40% in less than one year.”
This is according to a recently published report by the content delivery network and cloud cybersecurity company Cloudflare (via The New York Times), which states that, from June 2025 to April 2026, “human traffic declined across every major industry” by a minimum of 35 percent.
Cloudflare’s report also notes that Google has had a “unique role” in contributing to this decline, as the search engine accounts “for approximately 88% of referral traffic.” To explain this in simple terms, Google’s AI is scraping information from websites, regurgitating it within Gemini’s “AI Overview,” and not providing the websites it steals said content from with a page view. Publishers have begun to refer to this trend as “Google Zero,” which Cloudflare describes as “a world where little to no traffic comes from search referrals.”
And it gets worse, as Cloudflare’s investigation also concluded that “52% of crawler requests are now for AI training as of June 2026, up from 22% in Spring 2025.” This is important because, as reported by Adweek earlier this month, Google only uses one singular web crawler to “both index sites and train its AI models.” Again, in simple terms, that means if publishers opt out of appearing in Google’s AI Overview summaries, they also opt out of being indexed in Google’s search results.
One year after declaring Content Independence Day, a dynamic market for monetized content has emerged. In this report, we examine how the rise of autonomous AI agents is upending traditional search referrals and detail the new infrastructure required to support a sustainable web…
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) July 1, 2026
That means that websites have a choice of either allowing Google to use the information scraped from their website in AI Overview, which doesn’t provide said websites with a page view, or they opt out of appearing in Google’s search results altogether—which is a pretty lousy choice to have to make, when Google provided 88 percent of all referral traffic.
While Cloudflare states that news organizations and media companies were the “earliest industries” to feel the impact of Google’s AI integration, the rise in its adoption has resulted in other industries losing “as much as 40” percent of their traffic too: “Today, similar dynamics are impacting businesses across retail, software, IT, and finance. Some of the most heavily crawled categories have seen human traffic decline as much as 40% in less than one year.”
However, this isn’t the case in at least one country: the United Kingdom. Why? Because at the start of June 2026, the Competition and Markets Authority regulator announced that it would force Google to provide a way for publishers to remove their results from Google’s AI Overview without being deindexed. In response, Google announced a trial that would enable publishers in the UK to opt out, and promised that said control features “will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features.”
Ultimately, though, until these tools are rolled out to publishers in other regions, it leaves us with a very simple question that Google seems oddly shy about answering: How exactly does Google plan to fill its AI Overview with results if it’s gutting the revenue that supports the websites it sources said information from in the process? After all, it will be pretty difficult for Gemini to steal information from said websites once they all go bankrupt.
