Half of Observador's visits used to come from Google. That traffic is now shrinking
At Lisbon AI Week, Observador general director Rudolf Gruner said roughly half the paper's visits came through Google tools, and that share is falling as AI answers people directly. The homepage, over 60% of page views in 2014, is now under 20%.
Lisbon AI Week is running across the city through Sunday, with dozens of events from hackathons to debates on creativity, health and security. At one of them, on AI and the media, a newspaper boss did something AI panels rarely do: he put his own numbers on the table.
Half the visits came from Google
Rudolf Gruner, general director of Observador, said roughly half of the paper’s visits used to arrive through Google’s tools (Search, Discover and Google News). That traffic is now falling. He put a name on it that the industry already uses, “zero click”: people find the answer on the results page itself, or in an AI assistant, and never click through to the source.
He didn’t give a percentage for the drop. He gave a different one that tells the same story from another angle. When Observador launched in 2014, more than 60% of its page views happened on the homepage. Today it’s under 20%. Readers no longer walk in the front door and browse the order the newsroom chose. They arrive one story at a time, from notifications, searches and social feeds.
Gruner compared AI to “a TGV” the paper is racing to board, and added a bill nobody yet knows who will pay: the five or six biggest AI groups are expected to spend around 600 billion dollars in capital expenditure in 2026, against revenue he called “largely insufficient” to cover it.
What about the juniors?
Next to him sat Pedro Morais Leitão, managing director of Media Capital, which owns TVI and CNN Portugal. His was the debate’s most uncomfortable line: someone with little experience, he said, ends up with little to add to work AI already does. He stressed that doesn’t mean juniors are shut out, only that entry-level roles will have to be completely rethought.
At Observador that shift has already reached the tech team, where Gruner said there are now almost no junior developers. Not the newsroom, though. The paper is still hiring young people for radio and writing.
Its answer to the lost clicks is more weight on subscriptions and on exclusive, in-depth journalism, at a time when AI assistants are already fighting each other for searchers’ attention. The full programme, with most events free, is on the Lisbon AI Week site, running until 27 September.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Lisbon AI Week (official press material)
