USA Today Co. is actively working on ways to compete with Google's AI Overviews for World Cup-related search traffic, according to a report published by Digiday on the publisher's digital strategy.

The initiative targets one of the most consequential shifts in search behavior affecting news publishers today: Google's AI Overviews now answer many informational queries directly on the results page, reducing the share of users who click through to publisher sites. Sports coverage — with its predictable query patterns around scores, schedules, fixtures and tournament brackets — sits squarely in the category of informational search that AI-generated answers absorb most effectively.

The World Cup presents the problem in concentrated form. Major tournaments drive enormous spikes in search demand from casual fans who rarely follow soccer otherwise. Those users tend to ask simple factual questions — when a match kicks off, who scored, how a group stands — exactly the query type AI Overviews are designed to resolve without a click. For a publisher like USA Today Co., which invests in live coverage, breaking news and editorial packaging around big sporting events, that click-loss risk goes straight to the economics of event coverage.

What the report establishes — and what it doesn't

Digiday's reporting confirms that USA Today Co. is developing a deliberate strategy to stay visible and competitive in search results for World Cup news as AI Overviews expand. This is a publisher-side response to a confirmed Google product: AI Overviews rolled out across U.S. search results in May 2024 and have since expanded to more countries and query types, and Google has confirmed their continued integration into results pages, including for news-adjacent informational queries.

What the report does not quantify is the outcome. Digiday's piece does not publish click-through-rate data, traffic-loss figures or ranking measurements tied to USA Today Co.'s World Cup pages. Any claim about how much referral traffic AI Overviews have already cost the publisher — or how much the new strategy has recovered — would be speculation beyond the source.

Why sports publishers are exposed

The structural risk falls hardest on sites whose search traffic depends on quick-answer queries rather than brand-driven visits. That describes aggregators, live-blog-heavy newsrooms and score-and-schedule pages. Publishers with strong direct traffic, app audiences and newsletter relationships face softer exposure because fewer of their readers arrive through generic search in the first place.

Event coverage amplifies the stakes. Tournaments like the World Cup produce short, intense windows of maximum search demand. Publishers staff up and build dedicated hubs to capture that demand. If AI Overviews intercept a meaningful share of those queries, the return on that investment shrinks — and it shrinks precisely during the period when sports desks are most expensive to run.

USA Today Co.'s decision to treat AI Overviews as a competitive problem to be solved, rather than a background condition to be endured, signals how large publishers now frame search strategy. The question is no longer only how to rank. It is how to earn a click — or a citation — when the search result itself may already contain the answer.

What to watch

The next measurable test arrives with the World Cup itself, when search volume for tournament queries peaks. Watch whether USA Today Co.'s World Cup pages appear within or alongside AI Overviews as cited sources, whether the publisher reports traffic performance against previous major-event benchmarks, and whether Google expands AI Overviews treatment of live sports results during the tournament. Those signals will show whether publisher counter-strategies can preserve search-driven economics in AI-era results pages.