Publishers can hardly be blamed if they lack warm and fuzzy feelings for Google. Some say they’re trapped within its walled garden, and others complain that Google’s new AI
Overviews is not delivering the traffic they expect.
But things may be changing. As reported Tuesday in MediaPost, Google is planning a pilot program that will deploy
artificial intelligence to drive monetization and compensation for publishers. Details are scarce thus far, but Google is looking to work with 20 national news organizations.
That’s very good news. But some of the veneer was rubbed off the announcement when Pew Research reported that “users clicked a link under an AI summary once every 200
times.” This was based on a month-long survey of almost 69,999 Google searches.
Pew also found that Google users who see an AI summary are much less likely to click
on links to other websites than users who do not see one.
advertisement
advertisement
According to Pew, here’s what Google users do when they encounter search pages with AI summaries:
- Click on a link in the AI summary—1%
- Click on a link from the search results—8%
- End browsing session—26%
- Continue to search Google—32%
- Leave Google to browse a different site—34%
Google responded that the survey was
based on “flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of search traffic.” And at least one critic has questioned Pew’s methodology and its sample
size—900+ adults and 66,000 search queries.
Maybe, but these findings have led to protests in the UK. Owen Meredith, the chief executive of the News Media
Association, said Google is trying to keep users “within its own walled garden, taking and monetizing valuable content – including news – created by the hard work of
others.”
And even before the Pew report came out, the Independent Publishers Alliance filed an antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission, accusing Google of
“misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search,” Reuters reported. The group also charges that Google is placing its AI Overviews above traditional search results,
causing loss of traffic and revenue loss to publishers.
Now another report has emerged. An analysis by Authoritas determined that a site previously ranked first in
a Google search result could lose 79% of its traffic if an AI Overview delivered the query results, the Guardian reports.
We can’t confirm that finding, and once
again Google has issued a very hearty defense, saying the report was based on flawed assumptions and analysis.
This is no time to get sentimental about the
all-powerful Google, but let’s be fair: it has acted more reasonably than Meta, say, cutting a deal with the state of California last year to provide funding for local newsrooms. (Of
course, California announced that its planned $30 million contribution will be cut by $20 million during the state’s 2025-26 fiscal year. Google followed suit, reducing its $15 million
commitment by a third.)
In the interest of full disclosure, this reporter is a heavy daily user of Google search, Gmail and YouTube.