The Click Calamity: How AI Scraping Is Costing Publishers Millions

Ivan Mathews October 4, 2025

Welcome to Deeep Dive, where SEO meets AI — and AI rewrites the rules.
In this episode, The Click Calamity, we expose how large language models are quietly consuming the web’s value chain. From trusted publishers facing million-hit scrapes to the rise of Google’s AI Overviews slashing traffic by 60%, we dig into the hard data, the shifting search behavior, and the coming collapse of the old “click economy.”

Listen to learn:

Who’s really footing the bill for AI scraping — and how publishers are subsidizing billion-dollar models
Why click-through rates from AI summaries are catastrophically low (as little as 0.037%)
How user behavior is evolving: AI isn’t replacing Google, it’s expanding how people search
Why brand authority and trust signals are now the only currency that matters
The new SEO frontier: the visibility economy

Episode Summary:

“The Click Calamity” explores how AI content scraping and Google’s AI Overviews are fundamentally reshaping digital publishing and search economics. Through hard data and real-world cases, Deeep Dive breaks down the tension between AI convenience and human-created truth. Discover why traditional SEO metrics like clicks and rankings are fading — and why the future now belongs to brands that can command trust and visibility in AI-driven results.

🎙️ Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your Deeep Dives.
👉 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI, search, and the economics of the modern web.

Key Talking Points / Takeaways

Segment	Key Insight
AI Scraping Crisis	Trusted Reviews hit with 1.6M AI scrapes in 24 hours, costing them thousands — but returning only 603 human clicks (0.037% CTR).
Broken Value Exchange	Publishers bear the infrastructure costs while AI firms profit.
User Behavior Data	SEMrush’s 260B-row study shows AI isn’t replacing search, it’s expanding it.
Rise of “Doing” Queries	40% of AI prompts are task-based (“doing”), not just asking for info — a new frontier for marketers.
AI Overviews’ Impact	Traffic drops up to 66% on desktop when AI summaries appear.
Trust Over Relevance	Users click only if they recognize and trust the brand — trust filters first, relevance second.
The Visibility Economy	SEO is shifting from ranking to citation prominence and brand mentions in AI answers.
New Strategy	Focus on brand authority, original data, and “chunked” content for AI readability.
Future Outlook	Build direct user relationships — don’t rely solely on Google or AI intermediaries.