AI summaries are starving news sites of traffic, study finds

Artificial intelligence (AI) is siphoning off digital audiences, with news companies warned of the potentially devastating impacts as AI-generated summaries increasingly replace traditional search results.

According to a new study, AI summaries can cause a steep dip of 80 percent in clickthroughs and referral traffic, threatening the financial viability of independent print journalism.

The imminent threat has been posed by Google’s AI overview that is responsible for summarising a search result with a block of texts. Given its seamless accessibility, some media owners consider it as an existential threat to the news organizations heavily reliant on search result traffic.

According to The Guardian, a new analysis by the Authoritas analytics has indicated that the website that previously held the top spot in search results could see their traffic plummet by roughly 79 percent due to superiority of AI overviews over query results. This paradigm shift suggests potential impact on organic traffic for top-ranked sites.

The study also found that links to YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, were leading as compared to the normal research result system.

Moreover, this research-based study has been a part of a legal complaint to the UK’s competition watchdog about the repercussions of Google AI Overview.

In response to the findings, a Google spokesperson issued a statement, declaring the study “inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions and analysis.”

The spokesperson clarified, defending the use of AI: “People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for websites to be discovered. We continue to send billions of clicks to websites everyday, and we have not seen dramatic drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.”

However, according to senior news executives Google has repeatedly repudiated to provide the data they need to assess the implications of AI summaries on digital traffic. 

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