Six UK charities told Press Gazette today that website traffic has fallen over the past twelve months as Google AI Overviews answer health questions inside the results page. Blood Cancer UK supplied page-level figures showing the steepest losses on its narrowest clinical pages, while its online community forum grew.

Press Gazette published its report on Monday, August 17, 2026, written by Emily McPhee. According to the article, UK charities have reported declining web traffic as readers take information from AI-generated answers rather than from the expert sources that produced it. Health charities were described as particularly hard hit, with patients researching their conditions presented with extensive AI-written summaries that push links to charity websites far down the results page.

The article names six organisations that reported significant traffic declines over the preceding twelve months: Blood Cancer UK, Cancer UK, Mind, the Mental Health Foundation, The Brain Tumour Charity and Save the Children.

Page-level data from Blood Cancer UK

The most granular figures came from Blood Cancer UK. Kate Keightley, associate director at the charity, reported declines of 53% on the leukaemia page, 45% on the MGUS page, 32% on the myeloma page, 28% on the lymphoma page, 20% on the AML and MDS pages and 17% on the MPN page.

Page views on the charity's general blood cancer information hub remained comparatively stable across the same period. That split is the analytically useful part of the disclosure.

"This suggests the decline is concentrated in exactly the kind of narrow, factual searches AI Overviews are built to answer directly, rather than reflecting a broader loss of interest in our health information as a whole," Keightley said.

The pattern is consistent with a substitution effect rather than a demand collapse. Queries with a single defensible answer are the queries a generative summary can resolve without a click. Queries that require orientation, browsing or comparison are not.

A second set of Blood Cancer UK numbers points the other way. Over the same period, page views on the charity's online community forum, where people affected by blood cancer connect with one another, increased by 86%. The average rate of engagement rose 143%.

"Visits to some of our disease-specific information have fallen, while engagement within the same period in our online community has grown," Keightley said.

She added: "What is particularly interesting is the growing appetite for lived experience. While AI can provide an instant summary, it can't replace the reassurance and understanding that can come from speaking to somebody who has been through something similar."

Keightley also set out the stakes attached to the accuracy of the answers now standing between patients and charity content. "People searching for information about leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma may be newly diagnosed, worried about symptoms or trying to understand treatment for someone they love. It's vital that whatever route they take to find answers leads them to information that is accurate, trusted and appropriate to their circumstances."

A 270-word answer above the source

Press Gazette documented the mechanism with a single query. A Google search for the term "what to do when I get blood cancer" generates a detailed 270-word AI-generated summary carrying the disclaimer "AI generated responses may include mistakes". Much of the information in that summary is taken from the Blood Cancer UK website, whose main link now sits far below the scroll.

That configuration is the whole dispute in miniature. The charity supplies the substance. The summary supplies the presentation. The link that once carried the reader to the charity, and with it the relationship, the newsletter signup and the donation prompt, arrives after a scroll that most readers do not perform.

Research covered by PPC Land in July 2025 found that most users read only the top third of Google AI Overviews, with median scroll depth reaching about 30% of the generated content. A separate measurement recorded 52% average scroll depth for health queries in the Your Money, Your Life category, higher than the general average but still short of the full answer.

Mind, the Mental Health Foundation and The Brain Tumour Charity

Mind has conducted research showing that 60% of people are now turning to chatbots for mental health support. The charity's assessment of that finding was cautious: "This suggests that while people are increasingly turning to AI to support their mental health, it is not always seen as a like-for-like replacement for human-centred care."

Lee Batchelor, head of marketing and content at the Mental Health Foundation, framed the outcome in mission terms rather than traffic terms. "If someone finds trusted, evidence-based mental health information that helps them, even without visiting our website, that's still a positive outcome and very much part of our mission," he said.

Batchelor added an observation about the composition of the remaining audience: "What's interesting is that the people who do come to our website often seem to arrive with a clearer purpose, whether they're looking for support, helping a loved one or choosing to donate."

That description matches what several commercial publishers have reported through the same period. Fewer sessions, higher intent per session. It does not resolve the revenue question for organisations whose funding model depends on reach rather than on conversion rate.

The Brain Tumour Charity provided a figure and a qualification. Russ Peach, website officer, said "donations have remained fairly constant because we are mostly seeing the traffic fall-off affecting our organically-served support and information pages instead of our campaign-driven fundraising efforts." That stability sits alongside what Peach described as "a drop in web traffic of approximately 27%".

The distinction is structural. Fundraising pages are reached through campaign traffic, email, paid media and direct navigation. Information pages are reached through search. The channel taking the loss is the one that also performs the acquisition function, which places the effect on future donor pipelines rather than on the current year.

Save the Children optimises for the answer

Save the Children is the outlier in the group. According to the Press Gazette report, the charity is directly focusing on maximising visibility inside AI answers rather than treating the shift as a loss to be absorbed.

Ruby Harrison-Stock, senior digital experience manager at Save the Children, said: "AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT have fundamentally changed search behaviour, and our own data reflects that shift. Clicks and impressions on our site were down year-on-year in July, in line with an industry-wide trend that's seen up to 60% of searches end without a click. But we don't think it's possible to isolate 'AI impact' as a single cause of any traffic decline, since search behaviour, algorithm changes and platform shifts are all moving at once."

She continued: "What's notable is that this decline is happening at the same time that our AI visibility is growing strongly. Our AI overviews increased by 303% compared with July last year, and we remain the most-mentioned and most-cited charity brand in AI search across the topics we track."

Harrison-Stock also described the operating assumption behind the strategy: "That suggests some of this traffic isn't lost, but simply finding us in a different way. We began work on our AI optimisation strategy last year, treating this shift as a channel to optimise for rather than a threat."

The caveat she attached to her own numbers is the most rigorous statement in the report. Clicks fell and citations rose in the same window, but the report does not establish that the second caused the first to matter less. Nobody has demonstrated that a citation performs the acquisition work a click performed.

How the charity figures compare with measured market data

The declines reported by the charities sit inside a range that independent research has been narrowing for two years.

Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 keywords published on April 17, 2025 found that the first organic result loses an average of 34.5% of its clicks when an AI Overview appears. The same company repeated the measurement using December 2025 Search Console data and found the reduction had reached 58% for top-ranking pages.

Correlational studies were joined by a causal one. A randomized field experiment involving 1,065 desktop Chrome users, published on the Social Science Research Network on April 3, 2026 and revised on June 17, 2026, found that outbound organic clicks fell 39.8% and zero-click searches rose 34.5% when an AI Overview was displayed, while clicks on sponsored results stayed flat. The authors were Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon University.

Blood Cancer UK's 53% decline on its leukaemia page therefore sits above the causal estimate and close to the upper correlational figure. The Brain Tumour Charity's 27% site-wide drop sits below both, which is what would be expected of a whole-site average that includes pages never exposed to an AI Overview.

Scale differences also matter. Small publishers lost 60% of search referral traffic over two years according to Chartbeat data published in March 2026, against 47% for medium-sized publishers. Charity information sites, most of which operate at small or medium scale in traffic terms, fall inside that band.

Health is the most exposed category

The category concentration is not a matter of interpretation. Index Exchange analysed 1,200 publishers across 2025 and found news ad requests fell 7% year-over-year while health and nutrition verticals dropped 40 to 50%. Careers and education followed similar trajectories. The report attributed much of the health decline to the prevalence of AI Overviews in health-related results.

Commercial health media has recorded the effect on its balance sheet. Ziff Davis wrote off 54.8 million dollars against its health media assets as advertising revenue fell 6%.

The query volume involved is substantial. Google has stated that its surfaces handle roughly one billion health-related questions a day, and independent research published in February 2026 estimated the company processes approximately 13.7 billion daily searches across all categories.

Health queries also carry a distinct commercial treatment. Google classified healthcare as a sensitive vertical and blocked ads inside AI summaries for health queries alongside finance and gambling, before beginning a small United States test that admitted healthcare advertising into AI Mode. For charities, that history has a direct consequence: the surface absorbing their organic traffic has, for most of its existence, offered them no paid route back onto it.

The regulatory position in the United Kingdom

British charities operate inside the one jurisdiction that has imposed binding obligations on the mechanism.

The Competition and Markets Authority designated Google with Strategic Market Status on September 30, 2025, finding that the company accounts for more than 90% of general search queries in the United Kingdom. On June 3, 2026, the regulator imposed its first binding Publisher Conduct Requirement under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, covering the use of publisher content in generative products. The substantive obligations come into legal force on December 3, 2026.

Google responded the same day by beginning to test a Search Console toggle that instructs its systems not to return a site's content within AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini grounding. The control operates at domain level rather than page level. Page-level grounding controls are scheduled for March 3, 2027, after the CMA accepted Google's argument that finer granularity required additional engineering work.

The domain-level design is materially awkward for the organisations described in the Press Gazette report. A charity cannot currently remove its narrow clinical pages from generative answers while leaving its general hub in place. The choice available before March 2027 is all or nothing, and withdrawal removes a source of information that patients are, on the evidence of the Mind research, already consulting through AI.

The unresolved measurement question

Harrison-Stock's refusal to isolate AI as a single cause reflects a genuine limitation rather than institutional caution.

The evidence base for the counter-strategy is thinner than the evidence base for the loss. A critical survey of 45 generative engine optimization studies, submitted to arXiv in July 2026 by Olivier Martinez, concluded that no reviewed technique produces a stable cross-platform effect on discoverability or downstream traffic, and found that rewrites confined to page bodies can reduce a page's presence in the top ten by 16%.

The link between being mentioned and being visited is also weaker than the vocabulary suggests. Semrush research found the overlap between brands mentioned in answers and domains cited as sources falls as low as 30% on Gemini, meaning an organisation can be named in an answer while other sites supply the underlying evidence. The IAB published a measurement framework on August 4, 2026 noting that only 16% of brands systematically track AI visibility, and that the absence of a shared definition of a citation is part of the reason.

A 303% increase in AI Overview appearances is therefore a measurement of presence, not of outcome. Save the Children's own framing acknowledges as much.

Why this matters to the marketing community

Charity information pages are an unusually clean test case. They are non-commercial, they rank on merit, they answer the narrow factual queries generative summaries were built to resolve, and they have no paid alternative to fall back on inside the surface that replaced them. The traffic patterns they report are the substitution effect without the confounding variables that complicate publisher data.

For media buyers, the vertical concentration recorded by Index Exchange has direct inventory consequences. Health content that loses 40 to 50% of ad opportunities removes contextual and audience inventory from the open market, and the loss is not distributed evenly across categories. For agencies and in-house teams working on nonprofit accounts, the Blood Cancer UK split between falling information pages and a growing community forum is a data point about which formats retain audience when the factual layer is absorbed.

For anyone building an AI visibility programme, the charity numbers arrive with an unusually honest set of caveats attached. Two organisations in the report recorded rising AI presence and falling clicks in the same window. Neither claimed the first offsets the second.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Blood Cancer UK, Cancer UK, Mind, the Mental Health Foundation, The Brain Tumour Charity and Save the Children, six UK charities that supplied traffic data to Press Gazette. Named individuals include Kate Keightley, associate director at Blood Cancer UK, Lee Batchelor, head of marketing and content at the Mental Health Foundation, Russ Peach, website officer at The Brain Tumour Charity, and Ruby Harrison-Stock, senior digital experience manager at Save the Children.

What: All six charities reported website traffic falling significantly over the past twelve months following the rollout of Google AI Overviews. Blood Cancer UK disclosed page-level declines of 53% on leukaemia, 45% on MGUS, 32% on myeloma, 28% on lymphoma, 20% on AML and MDS and 17% on MPN, alongside an 86% rise in community forum page views and a 143% rise in engagement rate. The Brain Tumour Charity reported a site-wide traffic drop of approximately 27% with donations broadly unchanged. Save the Children reported a 303% year-on-year increase in AI Overview appearances alongside falling clicks and impressions. Mind cited its own research finding 60% of people now turn to chatbots for mental health support.

When: Press Gazette published the report on Monday, August 17, 2026. The traffic declines cover the preceding twelve months. Save the Children's comparison window is July 2026 against July 2025.

Where: The United Kingdom, where the Competition and Markets Authority designated Google with Strategic Market Status on September 30, 2025 and imposed a binding Publisher Conduct Requirement on June 3, 2026.

Why: Generative summaries resolve narrow factual health queries inside the results page, pushing source links below the scroll and removing the click that carried readers to the organisations that produced the underlying information. The concentration of losses on disease-specific pages, against comparative stability on general hubs and growth in community forums, indicates substitution on answerable queries rather than declining interest in charity health content.