Given our business focus we aren’t prone to hyperbole, but a news story which caught our eye this week signposts the rapid collapse of traditional news media with potential far reaching consequences for all who work with it.
Most of us now unthinkingly use AI Overviews (AIO), short summaries of search topics which appear at the top of search engine results pages, every day. Introduced in the UK by Google in August 2024, their impact on news publishers already looks to have been dramatic with the next wave of innovation potentially – hyperbole alert – cataclysmic.
In a recent Competition & Markets Authority submission, MailOnline owner, DMG Media cited AIOs as the likely reason for the fall in search engine click-through rates to its news outlets of up to 90%.
While getting to the story through a miasma of annoying pop ups on news outlet websites is frustrating, at a time when democracy feels increasingly fragile, maintaining a proliferation of diverse media voices has never mattered more. Regardless of whether we agree with their politics or agendas, in a tough market publishers need to secure revenue through clicks so that they can invest in journalism.
While Google says that it prioritises directing traffic to the web, as attention spans shorten, isn’t it inevitable that an instantly digestible AIO will suffice for most topics and we will only click if we are really interested? Who scrolls to organic links further down search engine referral pages if automatically served with handy summary?
As search engines work out how to better monetise AIOs, the model of publishers receiving clicks as a reward for generating content will become obsolete. The prospect of ‘Google Zero,’ the day that tech commentator, Nilay Patel says the search engine will stop sending traffic to third-party websites looks ever closer. With that, many news outlets will rapidly fail (N.B.: Where AIOs already contain links, DMG’s data suggests Google increasingly refers to its own websites such as You Tube).
As AI advances at lightning speed, the challenge for publishers increasingly looks existential. AIOs simply provide a summary of topic. AI Mode, available since July in the UK, creates a much more in-depth generative AI summary in response to search queries. Links are smaller and, on mobile, can reduce to a symbol without branding. It is perhaps no surprise that early US research tells us that while 24% of ‘traditional’ Google searches generate a click, this falls below 5% in AI mode.
This surely leaves a clear question – if news outlets fold, where will AI source its data and how accurate will that data be? It is likely that AIOs already lean heavily on sources such as Wikipedia, rather than content generated by journalists who verify their sources and comply with industry Codes of Conduct.
With search engine algorithms closely guarded, publishers are now scrambling to pinpoint how to write to have their content included in AIOs – and above all to secure links.
Every organisation that works with them, whether responding to an issue or simply sharing news, needs to do think about what AIOs mean for them and urgently consider how to ensure their messages are captured.
Above all, regulators, already grappling with how to stay ahead of constant innovation, must address the already unassailable market dominance of platforms with infinite resource to harness continuous AI development. Otherwise, AIOs will be driven by those who understand how to make their voice the loudest in an ocean of unregulated user generated content. Whatever our preferred news source, that surely isn’t an ocean we want to swim in?
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