India, July 23 -- For online websites, and especially publishers like news websites like us, clicks are bread and butter. The more traffic a website receives, the more revenue it generates for itself. However, a major roadblock has allegedly emerged for most online publishers. The argument at play is that Google's AI Overviews have reduced the amount of traffic websites are receiving because people searching for information tend to simply read the AI Overviews and not visit the cited sources, thereby reducing the number of clicks the websites receive.

However, the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, brushed this off in a recent interview with The Verge, where he stated that he remains optimistic about AI driving traffic to websites. Pichai als...