Google is now Googling for its massive U.S. audience — and news publishers face potentially billion-dollar consequences from the change.
Google announced Tuesday that it’s applying AI to powerful elements of search, from AI summaries to AI advice pages in clustered groups. AI summaries, which appear at the highest of search results and clearly summarize content found across the online, rolled out to all 246 million U.S. Google users on Tuesday.
The AI summaries end in web sites receiving less traffic overall as people simply search and browse what the AI generated without clicking anything.
As newsrooms receive less traffic and fewer money, their ability to create recent content decreases. At the identical time, Google is becoming less of a gateway to sources and more of a direct source, said Anastasia Kotsiubynska, head of search engine optimization at SE Ranking Entrepreneur.
“Most likely, there will still be misleading information in the search results and hallucinations, and many users are likely to use this information without double-checking,” Kotsiubynska warned.
Google I/O 2024 on May 14, 2024. (Photo by Christoph Dernbach/picture Alliance via Getty Images)
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Google’s search changes could cost web sites a complete of $2 billion; some could lose two-thirds of their traffic, in line with data from media industry growth company Raptive.
“This would be disastrous for our traffic as it is marketed by Google to further satisfy user requests, thereby further reducing the incentive to click through so we can monetize our content,” said Danielle Coffey, executive director of the News/Media Alliance CNN business.
This is searching within the Age of Gemini. #GoogleIO pic.twitter.com/JxldNjbqyn
– Google Google) May 14, 2024
Google, a big technology company with over 90% which has global search market share, can now tailor search results with AI summaries and pull them from web sites without guaranteeing website traffic or profits.
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“AI Overviews relies on the intellectual property of content creators, which raises serious questions about compensation and fairness,” Raptive said in a opinion.
Google links to web sites in its summary and names their sources.
Unlike OpenAI, which has deals with major publishers like Axel Springer and The Financial Times to compensate publishers for training AI of their articles and linking on to them, Google has yet to publicly announce the same take care of a serious publication given.
Related: An elite financial publication with a subscription price of $75 per 30 days lets AI use its articles for training
Google has one $60 million deal with Reddit, announced in February that it could train its AI on Reddit data.
