Six billion people are expected to watch some part of this World Cup, and for six weeks, the search behavior behind that audience looks like it did five years ago. Few other search categories behave this way today, and it will not be true here much longer.
Penske Media filed a federal court memorandum against Google in February arguing the company is cannibalizing publisher traffic through AI Overviews. Ahrefs, analyzing 300,000 keywords, found that queries triggering an AI Overview saw their position-one click-through rate fall from 7.3% to 1.6% between December 2023 and December 2025, a 58% decline after controlling for general trends. DMG Media, publisher of MailOnline and Metro, has reported click-through declines as steep as 89% on certain searches.
That is arguably the defining business problem in digital publishing right now, and the World Cup is the one live event big enough, and global enough, to test whether it applies everywhere or has a blind spot. This summer, it has a blind spot, and the World Cup sits inside it.
Why the tournament gets a pass from Google
Sistrix data shared by Press Gazette shows AI Overviews appear in only about 5% of soccer-related searches, compared with 72% for health content, making soccer one of the most resilient categories left in Google search. NewzDash puts the pre-tournament figure even more precisely at 5% to 10% of World Cup-specific queries, a share the firm expects to grow once in-match query patterns take over.
Running across the U.S., Canada and Mexico until the final in New Jersey on July 19, the tournament is happening inside one of the last corners of the internet where a click still mostly behaves the way it used to. Every brand spending against this World Cup, and every publisher covering it, is operating in a search environment that doesn’t exist almost anywhere else online right now.
That gap is not an accident of the algorithm, and it is specific to what a World Cup actually generates. Define Media Group’s analysis across 15 major news sites found breaking news traffic up 103% across Google Search, Discover and Google News since November 2024, even as evergreen content fell roughly 40% over the same period.
A World Cup match, a red card, a stoppage-time goal, a Golden Boot race that changes by the hour, all of that is precisely the kind of query Google is most cautious about answering with a static AI summary instead of a live link, because the cost of being confidently wrong about a scoreline in real time is higher than the cost of being wrong about almost anything else Google touches.
BrightEdge data puts high-risk YMYL (“Your Money or Your Life”) queries, the kind covering medical advice, legal rulings or financial transactions, at only an 11% AI Overview trigger rate in financial searches, for the same reason.
A live World Cup search sits closer to that caution zone than almost any other entertainment query, for six weeks every four years, and that timing accident provides an opportunity for brands and publishers smart enough to act.
How World Cup brands are actually competing for the gap
The conventional read is that any brand can win this moment just by showing up loud and official. The tournament’s own search data says otherwise. NewzDash’s analysis found that FIFA’s own global partners, the brands paying the most for official World Cup rights, including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Visa and Hyundai, underperformed in AI visibility compared with non-sponsors that simply maintained a stronger editorial and content presence, such as Nike, Puma and EA Sports.
Paying FIFA for the right to use the World Cup name does not buy a brand visibility inside Google’s answer layer during the tournament in the same way that earning sustained coverage does. It challenges the assumption that sponsorship alone guarantees search visibility, challenging the model that the World Cup has run on for decades, which assumed official status was the asset and content was just the wrapper around it. It also explains why Nike, locked out of FIFA’s official promotions for this World Cup entirely due to their agreement with rivals Adidas, can still out-position paying sponsors in the exact search environment those sponsors paid for the right to dominate.
Nike’s 185-film content structure behind “Rip the Script” generates a constant stream of fresh, citable World Cup material week over week, which is precisely the kind of sustained editorial signal that data shows AI systems reward, independent of any official tournament relationship. Adidas has the kit deal, the official ball, and the World Cup name itself, and it is still fighting for the same search visibility a non-sponsor is winning during the same tournament just by publishing more often.
The brands treating earned World Cup coverage as a bonus rather than the whole strategy are making a related mistake from the other direction. Heinz’s blacked-out “Unofficial Stadium Ketchup” and Levi’s covered-logo posts, both built directly off FIFA’s own clean-stadium rules, generated real pickup in a matter of days. The spike was real, and the brand recall around this specific tournament was likely real too, but one viral week tied to a stadium rule is not the same asset as a 39-day publishing cadence built around the tournament itself.
As the England football team commence their campaign in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, its captain Harry Kane, is reflected at a bus stop, an interactive billboard for Google’s AI assistant Gemini on Oxford Street, on 17th June 2026, in London, England. (Photo by Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images)
In Pictures via Getty Images
FIFA and Google are not bystanders to their own World Cup
FIFA is not a neutral party watching this play out, and its own positioning cuts against the idea that the tournament is simply a lucky AI-Overview-free zone it benefits from passively. FIFA’s “Football AI” initiative with Lenovo, unveiled by president Gianni Infantino, includes Football AI Pro, a generative tool that analyzes hundreds of millions of FIFA-owned data points from this tournament to generate insights “to all competing teams and soon to fans as well,” explicitly framed as part of FIFA’s Strategic Objectives for the Global Game through 2027.
FIFA is simultaneously the governing body benefiting from soccer’s AI Overview exemption in general search and an organization actively building its own AI answer layer to sit between World Cup fans and the information they want. The same institution profiting from Google’s caution around World Cup queries is racing to make sure fans never need to leave FIFA’s own ecosystem to get a World Cup answer either.
Google’s role is stranger, because Google is not infrastructure sitting outside this World Cup. It is also, functionally, a sponsor of it. Google Search sponsored The Athletic’s “Language of Soccer” campaign for this tournament, built broadcast integrations with Fox where analysts use AI Mode live on air during World Cup matches, and partnered with U.S. Soccer to support the men’s and women’s national teams through this World Cup, the 2027 Women’s World Cup, and the LA28 Olympics.
The same company whose AI Overviews are accused of starving publishers of traffic is running its own branded World Cup content campaign and actively pushing fans toward its AI Mode tool rather than away from search during the tournament. Google is marketing its AI products directly into the window where an immunity from AI overviews in search holds, which suggests the company could see more value in being seen helping with this World Cup than in fully automating it away just yet.
The window closes when the tournament does
Search Engine Roundtable has already documented cases where AI Overviews are showing up on breaking news searches and pushing the Top Stories carousel further down the page, with examples spanning sports and business queries alike. Technology continues to advance and improve, meaning that the mechanism protecting this World Cup right now, Google’s risk tolerance, is unlikely to last long.
Nothing FIFA, Google, or any sponsor has built guarantees the next World Cup cycle, four years from now, gets the same pass. Every other major event over the next four years, from elections to product launches, is likely to become increasingly AI-mediated. The World Cup offers a rare chance to study what digital marketing looked like before answer engines became the primary interface. That makes it more than a sporting event; it’s a control group for the future of search.
For brands, publishers, and FIFA’s own partners, this World Cup is less a permanent safe harbor than a six-week window that happens to be open during this specific tournament. The smart move, on the evidence of who’s actually winning the search fight right now, is to build like Nike rather than spend like a sponsor.