Check My Ads Institute, a Washington-based non-profit that campaigns for advertising market reform, published a report on October 7, 2026 arguing that Google and the programmatic advertising system are draining revenue from the news publishers whose work they rely on. Titled The Crocodile Effect: How Platforms Eat Their Own Supply Chains and written by Anastasia Micich, the report describes two separate pressures on newsrooms - Google's AI-generated answers at the top of search results, and websites built only to capture advertising budgets - and calls for antitrust action to break up Google alongside know-your-customer rules for every company that pays publishers for ad space.

The document contains no original research. Its figures come from academic studies, trade press, court coverage and Check My Ads' own earlier publications, and several of them date from 2020 to 2024. It also does not mention the opt-out control Google made available to every website in the world on August 31, 2026, five weeks before publication.

In Short

A watchdog group called Check My Ads says Google now answers people's questions at the top of its search page, so fewer readers click through to the news sites that wrote the information, while fake sites built to grab ad money take budgets that could have reached real newsrooms. This matters because news sites earn money from those visits and the ads shown to them, and the report says local news suffers most. The group wants Google broken up and every company in the ad chain to check who it is paying, although a court refused to break up Google's ad business in September 2026 and the report leaves out the AI opt-out Google gave all sites in August.

A two-sided squeeze

The report opens with what it calls the basic exchange of digital journalism. In its words, that exchange was simple: "publishers produce the reporting and the platforms that distribute it to readers send them back to the source content." According to Check My Ads, the exchange "is breaking down rapidly, threatening the future of journalism."

To describe the result, the report borrows a term it credits to Tim Soulo, described in the text as a marketing expert. The Crocodile Effect describes two lines moving apart, search impressions rising while clicks fall, like an opening jaw. The report says that "as platforms increasingly shape user behavior to keep on-platform, the gap between publishers' content distribution and their ability to monetize keeps it growing." The source it cites for the term is a paper by Kudos titled "Taming the Crocodile," rather than anything published by Soulo himself.

The jaws, in the report's framing, close from two directions. The first is platforms "diverting ad revenue to their AI-generated content, which scrapes original publisher content with no return to the publisher." The second is competition from made-for-advertising (MFA) websites, which the report describes as "often AI generated content farms with exclusively bot traffic." In one sentence, it summarises the measurement problem that publishers keep reporting: "Search impressions are rising, but click-throughs, a publisher's money-maker, are falling."

The report sets the stakes with figures from other organisations. Citing Northwestern University's Local News Initiative, it says nearly 40% of US newspapers have shut down, leaving 50 million Americans with limited access to local reporting. Citing Digiday from December 2025, it says news publishers "have reported up to a 90% fall in website traffic" over the past year. The 90% figure is presented as an upper bound reported by some publishers, not an industry average.

Issue one: AI Overviews

According to Check My Ads, Google formally launched AI Overviews in May 2024, and the feature "sent publisher clicks and revenue plummeting." The report describes AI Overviews as a default, always-on part of Google Search that places aggregated answers at the top of the results page, with the original sources listed underneath. It calls this a zero-click model.

The click data the report uses comes mainly from the Pew Research Center. Pew's study, which tracked 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025, found that users clicked a traditional result link on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared and on 15% when none did. The report's version is that an AI Overview "nearly halves" the rate of clicks on search results, and that the links embedded in the overviews themselves are clicked 1% of the time.

A second figure comes from Authoritas, through The Guardian's July 24, 2025 coverage. "A site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview," according to the analysis as quoted in the report. Check My Ads also states that AI Overviews "take up more than half of the SERP," pushing traditional links below the first screen. That claim carries no citation.

From there the report turns to placement. In its account, Google gives its own product the most valuable position on the page, a form of self-preferencing that the report sums up as Google having "permanently claimed the prime spot above the fold of every digital newspaper."

Accuracy is the next charge. Citing a New York Times analysis from April 2026 based on testing by the start-up Oumi, the report says AI Overviews are accurate about 90% of the time. Because Google processes more than five trillion searches a year, the remaining errors amount to tens of millions of inaccurate overviews every hour, the report says. It adds, citing Pew, that the overviews lean heavily on user-generated sources such as Reddit, YouTube and Wikipedia, which in the report's words are not subject to "the best practices of journalism."

The report's most quoted line comes in this section. "Publishers aren't necessarily losing their audiences, but rather their ability to reach them. Google is effectively eating its own supply chain."

Where the publisher's ad slot goes

The economic argument centres on advertising inventory. Google has added ad slots to AI Overviews, the report notes, citing Google's own help page "About ads and AI Overviews," which Check My Ads accessed on September 4, 2026. "The company has now effectively substituted ads on a publisher's site for Google's own real estate with no need to share the revenue," according to the report, "despite the fact that the content generated by the AI overview is scraped from the organic publisher content it has displaced."

The report then walks through the standard programmatic model: a publisher offers space, an advertiser pays for it, and a platform brokers the deal for a fee. With AI Overviews, it argues, that chain is skipped "because the first click never happens, and the value chain is never activated or executed." The section closes with a sweeping conclusion: "Google has essentially engineered a system where advertisers and publishers can no longer find their way to each other."

The title of this article comes from the report's policy section. Google, it says, can "truly profit twice: first from the content the company consumes to train its AI products, and again from the advertising dollars that used to flow to the publishers that created the original, scraped content."

Search Console and the crawler

Check My Ads says publishers cannot see what is happening to their own traffic. Search Console, Google's free reporting tool for site owners, "does not segregate traffic from general search, AI Overviews, and AI Mode," according to the report, which cites Search Engine Land's June 2025 reporting on the absence of AI Mode filters.

The report adds that since May 2026 "some of this information may be available via the use of Google's AI Assistant," but that the raw data is "for some reason, strictly limited to analysis with this AI assistant." The source attached to that sentence is Google's June 18, 2026 announcement of Ask Ad Manager, an AI agent inside Google Ad Manager, the publisher ad server. That is a different product from Search Console, and the date does not match the May 2026 claim.

PPC Land's own reporting gives a fuller picture of Search Console in 2026. A dedicated report for generative AI features arrived on June 3, 2026, and by August 31 it had reached every website. It shows how often pages appeared in AI features in Search and Discover. It shows no clicks and no queries, and AI impressions remain inside the overall performance totals. The report's core complaint, that publishers cannot see clicks from AI Overviews separately, therefore still stands; its description of what Search Console offers does not.

The crawler argument follows. Googlebot collects pages for the search index, and the report says the same crawl supplies data used to train Google's large language models. "If a publisher blocks the crawler to protect their content, Google will stop indexing them, and they will disappear from search results," according to Check My Ads, which puts Google's share of search at 90%. It calls the arrangement "truly a hostage situation for publishers."

Controls the report does not mention

That description was already out of date when the report appeared. On July 20, 2026, PPC Land reported that Google had given site owners a toggle to exit AI Overviews and AI Mode from inside Search Console. Content excluded through the control is not linked from AI features and is not used to ground AI answers, and the exclusion does not by itself change a site's ranking in conventional results. The control does not cover AI training, which Google handles through a separate Google-Extended setting. Its rollout reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026.

The toggle did not appear unprompted. The UK Competition and Markets Authority, which designated Google with strategic market status on September 30, 2025, imposed its first binding conduct requirement on the company in June 2026. PPC Land reported on June 3 that Google answered the UK order with a Search Console opt-out, with the substantive obligations taking legal force on December 3, 2026. Months earlier, on February 11, 2026, Sulina Connal, Google's managing director for news and books partnerships in Europe, had told a London conference that letting publishers skip AI Overviews was a huge engineering challenge.

The report also says the publisher "gets nothing" from the exchange. On September 30, 2026, PPC Land reported, citing The Information, that Google pays about 100 publishers when their pages shape AI answers, with several smaller sites receiving less than $1,000 over several months. Those sums are small next to the losses publishers describe, but a pilot payment programme is not nothing, and the report does not address it.

Nor does it cover the most recent US court decision on AI Overviews. Judge Amit Mehta dismissed Penske Media's antitrust suit over AI Overviews in a ruling reported on October 1, 2026, six days before the report's publication, finding that Penske had not pleaded any agreement under which Google promised to deliver a specific amount of traffic. Penske had filed the 101-page complaint on September 12, 2025.

The report is on firmer ground on regulatory scrutiny in Europe. It notes pushback from European independent publishers without naming them; the Independent Publishers Alliance, the Movement for an Open Web and Foxglove filed a complaint with the European Commission on June 30, 2025. The report also notes the Commission's formal antitrust investigation into Google's use of publisher content for AI. The report's endnote dates that investigation to December 8, 2025; PPC Land reported it opened on December 9, 2025.

Issue two: made-for-advertising sites

The second half of the report moves from Google's search page to the open web. MFA sites, according to Check My Ads, "are essentially fake pages engineered to game the programmatic advertising system and siphon advertiser budgets." In the report's description, they are usually AI-generated pages that create fake traffic through bots and collect money from advertisers who unknowingly fund them.

The reason this works, the report argues, is that "ad platforms have no legal or practical obligation to know who they are doing business with, and no incentive to do so." The source for that statement is Check My Ads' own June 15, 2026 report on advertiser verification.

Some content farms "even scrape and copy paywalled content days after the stories are posted," the report says. The citation for that sentence is a March 2026 Medium post titled "Google AI Overviews Are Reproducing My Paywalled Research for Free," which concerns Google's AI feature rather than content farms. A separate citation to Press Gazette, from July 2025, supports the report's statement that third-party scrapers advertise to AI companies that they can get around paywalls.

The numbers behind the waste

Three figures carry this section. The first is the unknown delta, which the report defines as "a phenomenon of untraceable ad dollars that never actually reach publishers" and puts at 15% of programmatic ad revenue, citing PubMatic. The 15% figure was first reported in a supply chain study by the UK advertiser body ISBA and PwC published in 2020. The report gives no newer measurement.

The second is that in 2023, 21% of all impressions and 15% of all ad spend went to MFA placements, according to an AdMonsters interview with DoubleVerify's chief product officer that the report cites. Those percentages match the ANA's programmatic transparency study published that year. Later measurement exists. PPC Land reported on July 28, 2026 that an analysis of Q1 2026 data by the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), the ANA and Fiducia put AI-generated slop at 1.3% to 2.4% of open web programmatic spend, while finding that such inventory was graded as premium more than 70% of the time. AI slop and MFA are not identical categories, so the two sets of figures cannot be compared directly, but the report relies on the 2023 numbers without noting that more recent ones have been published.

The third comes from NewsGuard, which the report cites as finding an increase of 300 to 500 spam websites each month, from a March 12, 2026 announcement.

The report also argues, without figures, that MFA economics reward disinformation, since radical content can be monetised "requiring little to no verification steps before receiving payment."

Government ads on a site hosting abuse material

A case study turns to the most serious brand-safety failure the report describes. In February 2025, the research firm Adalytics published findings about ads served on ibb.co and imgbb.com, an image-hosting service that, according to an announcement Check My Ads issued that month, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children had known since at least 2021 to host child sexual abuse material. Some of the ads were placed through Google's and Amazon's advertising technology, and some belonged to US government agencies.

The report quotes Adalytics directly: advertisers told the firm "their brand safety vendors had marked 100% of measured ad impressions served on ibb.co and imgbb.com as 'brand safe' and/or 'brand suitable'. Independent data obtained from URLScan.io confirmed that some of these media buyers' ads had served on explicit, sexual content."

Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn backed a congressional inquiry into the companies involved. The report's source for that inquiry is Check My Ads' own press release from February 7, 2025, titled "With the Support of Check My Ads Institute's Advocacy, Congress Launches Bipartisan Inquiry into Adtech Firms' Monetization of Child Abuse." The group was therefore a participant in the events it now cites as evidence.

Check My Ads reserves its harshest language for the verification industry. It notes that DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science "have claimed that their softwares protect brands," citing DoubleVerify's February 7, 2025 statement responding to Adalytics. It then says that the partnerships between those vendors and platforms such as Google's Display & Video 360 and Amazon DSP are "masterful works of marketing performance theater, meant to lull advertisers into a false sense of security." The report presents no data on how often those integrations fail beyond the Adalytics case.

Lobbying, standards bodies and TAG

A further section argues that self-regulation has not filled the gap. Alphabet spent $14.8 million on lobbying in 2024, according to the report, which cites Issue One. It argues that regulators often lack a full picture of the products they oversee, and that funding from large technology companies makes it difficult for politicians to act against them.

The IAB and IAB Tech Lab come in for criticism as bodies whose largest members and sponsors are major technology companies, with Google near the top of the list, according to the report, which sources that claim to an AdExchanger article from February 2020. The more recent example concerns IAB Tech Lab's Content Monetization Protocols initiative. According to the report, a comment period in April 2026 on rules for content licensing between AI companies and publishers placed the question of publishers blocking AI scraping bots out of scope. PPC Land reported that IAB Tech Lab published CoMP v1.0 on March 10, 2026, with comments open until April 9. That specification requires AI systems to have commercial agreements with publishers before crawling and sends bots that are refused access to a licensing page. The report does not quote the scoping language it objects to.

TAG is the other target. Google did not renew its TAG certification, the report says, citing an Adweek article from June 11, 2026 that also covered Procter & Gamble dropping its TAG mandate and The Trade Desk leaving its certifications. TAG describes itself as "the leading global initiative fighting criminal activity and increasing trust and transparency in digital advertising," according to the organisation's website as quoted in the report. Check My Ads' verdict is that Google's departure shows the certifications to be "no more than performance theater," a conclusion it supports by citing its own July 14, 2026 explainer, "It's time to stop paying the TAG tax."

The antitrust record, as the report tells it

Much of the second half of the report rehearses Google's legal history in the US and Europe. The Justice Department sued Google over search in October 2020. Judge Mehta found the search monopoly illegal in August 2024 and, in September 2025, declined to order a sale of Chrome while barring exclusive default deals with device makers and requiring Google to share some search data with competitors, according to the report.

In the ad tech case, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled on April 17, 2025 that Google had monopolised the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising. The report says Google holds 87% of the brokerage market that connects publishers and advertisers, and that this business made $30.36 billion in 2023, 9% of Google's revenue that year, citing The New York Times. At the remedies trial, according to the report, the Justice Department called Google a "recidivist monopolist"; the source given for that phrase is Check My Ads' own trial blog.

The decision Check My Ads wanted did not arrive. On September 2, 2026, Brinkema rejected the Justice Department's request to force a sale of AdX and accepted behavioural remedies instead. The report quotes her view that they would "likely provide a more expeditious path to address the ongoing competitive harms from Google's illegal monopoly." PPC Land later detailed the result as a six-year worldwide set of conduct rules, including a ban on tying DFP to AdX, the deprecation of Unified Pricing Rules for indirect transactions, and a requirement for AdX to bid into Prebid.

The report treats that ruling inconsistently. One paragraph says the judge "ruled in early September 2026 that Google would not be forced to break up its adtech businesses." A later paragraph refers to "awaiting the final ruling for the Google Ads trial in 2026," which reads as text written before September and not updated.

The DOJ's closing arguments of November 21, 2025 supply the report's rebuttal to Google's technical case. Google's expert had testified that divesting AdX or DFP "would be a software engineering undertaking of unprecedented complexity, with a high degree of uncertainty and no guarantee of success," according to the trial notes quoted in the report. The Justice Department's lawyer Matthew Huppert replied that there is "more than one way to bake a cake." The report also attributes to Huppert the line "It is called big tech for a reason, he says. For antitrust laws to continue to protect markets, the Court cannot accept that complexity confers immunity." The "he says" in the middle of that passage shows it is Check My Ads' live-blog summary of the argument rather than a transcript.

To argue that fines do not change behaviour, the report cites the Federal Trade Commission's $5 billion penalty against Facebook in 2019, when the company reported about $70 billion in revenue, putting the fine at roughly 7%. The main text says "5 billion out of 7 billion"; the endnote has the correct $70 billion.

In Europe, the report says the Commission fined Google "more than 3 billion USD" for abusing its ad tech dominance. The endnote gives the press release title as "€2.5 billion" and the date as September 4, 2025. The Commission imposed a €2.95 billion fine on September 5, 2025. The report quotes the Commission's statement that it "has ordered Google to bring these self-preferencing practices to an end" and that "Google has now 60 days to inform the Commission about the measures it intends to propose to that effect."

Two remedies

The policy section opens with Check My Ads' position: "Structural separation is not punitive overreach, nor too technically complex, nor impossible."

Structural separation

The first proposal is enforcement of antitrust law to separate Google's businesses. "As Google controls both the distribution of content and its monetization, on both the buy and sell sides of the ecosystem, it has now built an AI-assisted frontrunning advertising competitor that monetizes scraped publisher content," according to the report. It goes further: "Breaking up the most powerful companies in the world is the only way to ensure fair regulation and market balance for downstream stakeholders that are beholden to these platforms for revenue." The report supports the technical feasibility of a split with a July 2025 Knight-Georgetown Institute paper on divesting Chrome and with Google internal analyses discussed at the ad tech trial.

The report does not specify which Google units should be separated from which, or whether it means AI Overviews, the search ad business, the ad tech stack, or all three. Coming after a court declined a structural remedy in the ad tech case, the proposal now rests on appeals, new cases or legislation, none of which the report sets out.

Know-your-customer rules for publishers

The second proposal targets the open web. "With no KYC requirements, any publisher can get monetized in minutes," according to the report, which adds: "Right now, an MFA website and the New York Times could be competing for the same advertising dollars, and the MFA website may be winning." Its version of know-your-customer rules reads: "Ad brokers at every step of the programmatic process need to verify who they are paying to mitigate this problem, which means confirming ownership, validating domains, and auditing the supply chain."

The model is financial regulation. If KYC checks are required for brands to open bank accounts and buy investment services, the report argues, the same logic could extend to ad tech, a market it puts at 1,033.80 billion in 2026, citing Straits Research, and expects to more than double by 2034. The report gives no currency for that figure. Its own organisational profile, a few paragraphs later, says the global advertising industry "has grown to be worth more than 750 billion USD." The two numbers measure different things from different sources, and the report does not reconcile them.

The KYC proposal leaves practical questions open. It does not say whether verification should be imposed by law or adopted by platforms, which intermediaries would carry the duty, what would count as sufficient verification, or what it would cost the small and local publishers the report wants to protect.

The closing data

The conclusion returns to local news. Citing Rebuild Local News, the report says the closure of local outlets "has left more than 209 million people without local news coverage." That is more than four times the 50 million Americans the report cites earlier, from Northwestern, as having limited access to local reporting. The figures come from different methods and the report does not explain the gap. The Local Journalist Index it quotes links low journalist density to civic participation: counties in the bottom fifth averaged 40 on a Civic Participation Index, against 58 in the top fifth, and the more than 100 "double deserts" averaged 23.

On national publishers, the report cites Press Gazette data showing that 80% of the 50 biggest US news websites lost traffic between May 2025 and May 2026. CNN, the second most visited US news site, fell by almost a third between May 2024 and May 2025 and by another 14% the following year, according to the report. PPC Land reported a similar pattern in August 2025, when Press Gazette's ranking showed 44 of the top 50 US news sites with fewer visits in July than a year earlier.

What the evidence does not establish

The report attributes publisher traffic losses to AI Overviews largely through timing, noting that losses align "with the timeline of the release of AI Overviews." It does not separate that effect from other changes in Google's traffic. NewzDash data reported by PPC Land in December 2025 found that traditional web search fell from 51.10% to 27.42% of Google mobile traffic to news publishers between 2023 and the fourth quarter of 2025, while Discover rose from 37.03% to 67.51%. Those are shares, not volumes, but they show Google's referrals shifting between products as well as shrinking.

Stronger causal evidence exists, and the report does not use it. A randomised study by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University, covered by PPC Land on July 4, 2026, found that AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8% among 1,065 desktop Chrome users. That figure supports the report's direction of travel with a tighter method than the correlations it cites.

Other claims rest on speculation. The report warns that AI Overviews "pose a risk of preferencing the highest paying advertisers in the development of answers" and that "advertiser monetization is likely to be the driving factor behind the information they are fed." Its source is a Digiday newsletter from September 2024. It offers no evidence that ad spending shapes the content of AI Overviews.

Beyond the mismatched citations described above, the report supports its May 2024 launch date with Google's October 2024 post on the international expansion of AI Overviews. A number of its sources are Check My Ads' own publications, including its trial blog, its explainer on TAG and its June 2026 verification report.

The report contains no response from Google, Amazon, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, IAB Tech Lab or TAG. Check My Ads describes itself as "fully independent and free from industry influence" and says it does not "accept any money from tech companies." The report is published on a site that solicits donations and ends by presenting the group's own policy platform.

Why it matters for advertisers and publishers

For publishers, the report gathers in one place an argument that has been building in courts and regulators for two years: that the same company supplies much of their traffic, sells much of their advertising and now answers readers' questions before they arrive. The practical picture in late 2026 is more mixed than the report suggests, with an exit from AI features that keeps sites in search, no click data for those features, and conduct rules on AdX and DFP in place of a breakup.

For advertisers, the MFA and verification sections are the more direct concern. If AI-generated sites can still be graded as premium inventory, as the TAG and ANA analysis found, then the quality grades used to buy open web inventory are doing less than buyers may assume. A KYC regime of the kind Check My Ads proposes would shift the burden of proof onto the intermediaries that pay publishers, which would change how supply-side platforms onboard sites. Whether that happens through law or through buyer pressure, the report does not say.

For search advertisers, the report's claim that ads in AI Overviews substitute for ads on publisher pages describes a shift in where budgets land, though the report does not quantify how much spend has moved.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Check My Ads Institute, a US non-profit advertising watchdog based in Washington, through a report by Anastasia Micich. The report targets Google above all, and also criticises Amazon DSP, ad verification vendors DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, IAB Tech Lab and the Trustworthy Accountability Group.

What: A policy report, "The Crocodile Effect: How Platforms Eat Their Own Supply Chains," arguing that Google's AI Overviews divert clicks and ad revenue from publishers while made-for-advertising sites absorb programmatic budgets. It proposes antitrust enforcement leading to structural separation of Google, and know-your-customer obligations for every ad intermediary that pays publishers. It contains no original data, relies on secondary sources dating back to 2020, and omits Google's AI opt-out control, its pilot payments to publishers and the dismissal of Penske's lawsuit.

When: Published on October 7, 2026, five weeks after Judge Brinkema rejected a breakup of Google's ad tech business on September 2 and Google extended its AI opt-out control to every website on August 31.

Where: The United States, with references to European Commission proceedings and to news publishers worldwide.

Why: Check My Ads argues that platforms which once sent readers to publishers now keep both the readers and the advertising revenue, a gap it says threatens local journalism in particular. It wants regulators and courts to act where, in its view, industry self-regulation has failed.