Study: Only 1.1% of News Publisher Visits Come Directly From AI

According to a new study from Scrunch, only 1.1% of visits to news publisher sites that followed a user's conversation with an AI assistant were directly referred from an AI source. The study, conducted between February and June 2026, drew on millions of search queries, AI conversations, and publisher visits collected from a privacy-protected, opt-in panel of participants. The findings show that the vast majority of readers reach publisher sites not through AI, but via direct navigation or traditional search.

In numbers: within a week of a news-related AI conversation, a reader was 20.5 percentage points more likely to visit a publisher than after a non-news-related conversation. Of visits that followed an AI conversation, roughly three-quarters (about 75%) came via direct navigation, another 9% via traditional search, and just 1.1% via AI referral. Scrunch notes that this shows AI isn't creating new demand so much as aligning with a reader's existing news-reading habits.

Google AI Overviews — the AI-generated summary answers that appear in search results — showed up more often on low-click news queries specifically. Publisher click-through occurred in about 20% of queries where AI Overviews appeared, versus roughly 30% where they didn't. But comparing the same query with and without AI Overviews narrowed that gap to just 2 percentage points. During the study period, AI Overviews appeared on roughly one in four news queries, most often for information-driven topics like weather or stock prices.

Large publishers captured most of the AI-driven traffic. When an AI assistant mentioned a publisher the user hadn't named in their query, visits to that publisher rose 10.6 percentage points the next day and nearly 20 percentage points over the following week. Large publishers accounted for 82% of all unprompted publisher mentions by AI assistants and 97% of the resulting visits, while mid-sized publishers captured about 17% of mentions but a much smaller share of the follow-on traffic.

Scrunch cautions that a publisher measuring AI impact solely by referral traffic risks missing a large number of interactions that later convert into direct visits or ordinary search. The company recommends publishers track their presence in AI responses alongside standard referral metrics.