According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Google’s AI overview and other AI-powered tools, including chatbots, are devastating traffic for news publishers.
Now people can simply ask the chatbot for answers – sometimes generated from news content filmed without the knowledge of the publisher, but there is no need to click on the blue Google link. This means that news sites are falling sharply, cutting back on what Traffic Publishers need to maintain quality journalism.
Last year, Google released an overview of AI, a search result summary tool. According to the journal, the deployment hit traffic to sites such as vacation guides, health tips and product reviews. Google’s ChatGPT rival, AI mode, is expected to hit traffic even harder. There are fewer external links and respond with a conversational tone.
According to Simarweb data cited in The Wall Street Journal Report, the percentage of traffic from organic searches on New York Times to paper desktop and mobile sites fell to 36.5% from 44% three years ago.
Google likes to talk about something else. At Google’s developer meeting in May, the company said that AI overview features increased search traffic, but it may not be for publishers.
Publishers like the Atlantic and the Washington Post talk about the need for the industry to shift its business models to combat this threat. Some have resorted to content sharing transactions with AI companies for additional revenue streams.
The Times recently signed an agreement with Amazon to obtain licenses for editorial content and trained Tech Giant’s AI platform. Several publishers, including the Atlantic, have signed up to work with Openai. The plan for AI startup Perplexity is to share ad revenue with news publishers when the chatbot surfaces content in response to a query.
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