This is a problem I have heard over and over across different publishers.

Global news seems to be oversaturated. There are dozens of outlets repackaging snippets from reuters and elsewhere into articles. They come out around the same time, hit more or less the same beats, and for the reader are essentially fungible with other articles on the topic.

Before AI overviews they would use SEO to game their way into traffic. That allowed everyone to publish the same content with lots of friction and the biggest brands would still do well. It seems AI overviews has shown these companies users "revealed preference", and it isn't for their high friction websites.