Google's AI Overviews : The Silent Killer of News Publishers?
I've been watching the news publishing world freak out lately. And honestly, they've got good reason. Google's AI Overviews feature is absolutely crushing website traffic since its widespread rollout in May 2024. It's brutal.
The numbers don't lie. CNN's traffic dropped about 30% compared to last year. Business Insider and HuffPost? Even worse - nearly 40% drops. Ouch. The Verge 's publisher Helen Havlak confirmed what everyone suspected: their Google traffic tanked right when AI Overviews showed up.
This is just the latest chapter in the whole "zero-click search trends" saga. You know what I mean - when you search for something and get your answer right on Google without clicking anything else. But now it's AI-generated content doing the answering, and publishers are getting desperate.
Why? Because their ad revenue is evaporating. No clicks = no money. Simple as that.
Some big players aren't taking this lying down. The New York Times is suing OpenAI over copyright issues. News Corp and Axel Springer went a different route, signing licensing deals to get paid for their content. But what about smaller publishers?
It's literally an "extinction-level event" for many sites. The Planet D , a travel blog, shut down after losing 90% of their traffic! Can you imagine watching your business disappear overnight because of an AI feature?
Google claims users love AI Overviews. Well, duh. It's convenient. But a Pew study found people who see these AI summaries are half as likely to click through to actual websites. Meanwhile, Google's making bank by showing ads alongside these AI snippets. Talk about having your cake and eating it too.
So what are publishers doing to survive in this AI era? The Verge is going all-in on subscriptions, podcasts, and newsletters. They're even trying to make their site feel more like social media with infinite scrolling and following features. But getting people to the site in the first place? That's the real challenge.
Some companies are getting creative. Cloudflare is pushing a "pay-as-you-crawl" model where AI bots would have to pay before scraping content. Makes sense to me! Others are using tools like Scrunch AI to optimize their content for AI exposure, but that works better for product companies than newsrooms.
Here's the irony though - AI needs journalism to exist. Columbia University researcher Klaudia Jaźwińska points out that chatbots can't do original reporting. They need journalists' work to function at all!
But will that save the future of journalism in the AI era? I'm not so sure. The web traffic decline is real, and the impact on advertising revenue is devastating.
What do you think? Should Google compensate publishers? Or is this just evolution of the internet?
One thing's clear - the subscription models online are becoming less optional and more necessary for survival. And that might change how we all consume news forever.
