In today’s Digest, we cover a new study finding AI is accelerating the collapse of Google Search referral traffic, the EU fining AliExpress €550m over failures to police illegal and counterfeit products, and Beehiiv launching Community and AI Copilot as it expands beyond newsletters.

Google traffic to UK publishers set to halve?

Publishers now have data confirming what many have long suspected: AI is rapidly eroding the referral traffic that once flowed from Google Search to news sites. The AOP's new Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study, conducted by DJB Strategies, analysed six months of traffic across eight major UK publishers, covering 10.8 billion pageviews. The findings show organic Google Search referrals fell 7.1% between the first and second quarters of 2025, a period that notably coincided with Google reporting 12% growth in Search revenue and a significant expansion of its AI Overviews feature. In other words, as Google's AI-driven search tools grew more prominent and profitable, the publishers whose content feeds those very tools saw their traffic from the platform sharply decline.

If that 7.1% quarterly decline holds steady, the study warns, pageviews delivered by Google could be cut in half by the third quarter of 2027, a projection that doesn't even factor in the potential compounding effects of habitual AI use further suppressing return visits over time. 

EU fines AliExpress for DSA violations 

The European Commission has fined AliExpress €550m (£473m) for breaching its Digital Services Act obligations. Regulators found the company failed on multiple fronts; It never properly evaluated whether it had enough staff to review potentially illegal listings, overestimated how effective its detection systems actually were, and relied on an inadequate quantitative metric to gauge whether illegal products were being prevented from reappearing. 

Commission testing found that many illegal items were recommended or advertised to shoppers before ever being removed. Beyond the assessment failures, the Commission also identified concrete gaps in enforcement detected illegal products often stayed online for weeks, the platform's penalty policy wasn't properly enforced against repeat offenders, and product compliance checks could easily be dodged through mis-categorisation, allowing sellers to exploit looser rules meant for other product types. 

Beehiiv adds subscriber chat & AI 

Beehiiv is rolling out a new Community feature that lets subscribers of a given creator chat with one another directly on the platform, alongside a new AI Copilot designed to help creators manage and grow their audiences. The moves are part of Beehiiv's broader push to position itself as a full creator platform. Community aims to replace the separate Discord servers, Slack channels, and Facebook groups that creators currently rely on for subscriber discussions, letting them instead build discussion forums natively within Beehiiv, complete with paid membership tiers for exclusive chatroom access. 

The company is also introducing programmatic advertising, letting creators sell newsletter ad slots and select ads likely to perform best based on their audience and content.