Blood Cancer UK’s leukaemia information page lost 53% of its page views over the past twelve months, the steepest decline among six UK charities that supplied traffic figures to Press Gazette on Monday. Health information sits in a category where an answer that is wrong, incomplete or stripped of context is not a traffic problem. Google AI Overviews now generate detailed summaries for narrow clinical searches, and the charities’ own numbers show where that substitution is landing hardest.
Kate Keightley, associate director at Blood Cancer UK, gave a full page-level breakdown: leukaemia down 53%, MGUS down 45%, myeloma down 32%, lymphoma down 28%, AML and MDS down 20%, and MPN down 17%. The charity’s general blood cancer information hub held roughly steady across the same window. Keightley tied the pattern to query type rather than falling interest, since the affected pages answer narrow, single-fact questions an AI summary can settle without a click.
Over the same period, page views on Blood Cancer UK’s peer support forum rose 86%, and average engagement per visit rose 143%. Keightley described the two audiences as distinct rather than substitutable: an instant summary answers a factual question, but it does not replace the reassurance of hearing from someone who has faced the same diagnosis. Nothing in the charity’s disclosure suggests the forum growth offsets the lost information traffic. The two trends simply moved together across the same twelve months.
Save the Children took the opposite approach, building a strategy around AI visibility rather than absorbing the shift as pure loss. Clicks and impressions fell year over year in July, the charity told Press Gazette, while its AI Overview appearances rose 303% against July 2025 and it remained the most cited charity brand in the topics it tracks. Ruby Harrison-Stock, senior digital experience manager at the charity, declined to isolate AI Overviews as the sole cause of the click decline, pointing to simultaneous shifts in algorithms and platform behavior. She said some lost traffic may simply be finding the charity through a different route, though the report stops short of showing that a citation replaces a click.
Blood Cancer UK’s leukaemia figure lines up against measured industry benchmarks rather than standing alone. Ahrefs found that a page in Google’s top organic slot loses 34.5% of its clicks once an AI Overview appears, based on 300,000 keywords measured in April 2025, and that figure rose to 58% for top-ranking pages when the analysis was repeated on December 2025 data. A randomized experiment covering 1,065 Chrome users, published in April 2026 and revised in June, measured a 39.8% causal drop in outbound organic clicks on queries returning an AI Overview. Blood Cancer UK’s 53% leukaemia decline sits above that causal estimate and near the top of the correlational range. The Brain Tumour Charity’s site-wide drop of about 27% sits below both figures, consistent with a whole-site average that dilutes page-level effects.
All of the charity figures are self-reported, supplied directly by the organizations rather than independently audited. The United Kingdom is the one market where the mechanism now carries binding rules. The Competition and Markets Authority named Google as holding Strategic Market Status in September 2025 and imposed a Publisher Conduct Requirement on June 3, 2026, with substantive obligations taking effect in December 2026. Google’s response, a Search Console toggle that withdraws a domain from AI Overviews and AI Mode (Google’s conversational search experience), plus Gemini’s grounding layer, works only at the domain level. Page-level controls are not scheduled until March 3, 2027.
For search teams working nonprofit or health accounts, the charity data functions as a page-level exposure map, not just a case study. Run Blood Cancer UK’s per-page range against Ahrefs’ 58% top-page benchmark to flag which narrow, single-answer pages carry the most risk, and treat the domain-level opt-out limit as a decision to make before December 2026, not after.
Reporting by Emily McPhee for Press Gazette, published August 17, 2026.
