AI Overviews
By all indications, AI is gobbling up the traffic search results previously divvied to other sites around the web.
So while previously Google and the likes of Bing and Duck Duck Go would have served as onramps to a larger online excursion—users being sent to a blog or marketplace or news site or online tool after entering their search—now these search engines (yes, even Duck Duck Go is getting in on the AI chatbot action) tend to keep that traffic from leaving their platform.
They accomplish this by grabbing the content all those other sites offer, incorporating it into their training data, and then having their AI systems serve it up (as “overviews”) to users, right there on the search results page.
This is being seen as a death sentence for many sites, publications, and businesses, as traffic from search engines has long been a primary means of grabbing attention, eyeballs, and customers.
Web traffic doesn’t account for as much direct revenue as it once did in the heyday of online advertising, each visit garnering resulting in a small amount of revenue for the ad-displaying site, but visits do still generate ad revenue for many publishers, alongside subscriptions and products: so more traffic equals more direct revenue, plus the chance to sell visitors things, like mugs or apps or access to paywalled content.
I make part of my living from online content, so I’m not thrilled about this, and the analytic journalist in me worries about the news in particular, as funding for real-deal journalism is always a bit precarious and this could make it even more so.
Another part of me wonders if this might ultimately be a good and necessary change, though.
The traffic-to-revenue model has always sucked, partly because it leads to all sorts of bad incentives.
The advertising hellscape that is the modern web is the consequence of everyone scrambling to get more eyeballs on whatever they’re selling (or whichever ads are paying their bills), and using the web without some kind of ad-blocker these days is simply too much for many people to stomach.
Changing that paradigm could be welcome, then, even if we don’t have a solid sense of what might replace it.
It also makes a sort of sense to aggregate all available data in this way, as it could, with time, make it easier for people to get answers to questions, conduct research, etc.
Right now these AI overviews are not great, and if you’re looking for 100% definitely true answers or conducting actual, non-superficial research, you’re going to need to go beyond the AI’s aggregated responses. But there’s reason to believe these summaries and resources will continue to get better, generating higher-quality answers (it already has for many types of search), and as that happens, that could become a lot more useful and more intuitive, especially compared to current search options.
The big question is how all these people and other entities producing and publishing the work that feeds the AI systems can continue to function if their sources of revenue disappear.
I haven’t seen a good answer to this question yet, and I suspect that’s because no one has figured out a model that both allows people to do this kind of work professionally, while also not making ultra-competitive AI companies less competitive (because they would have to spend money on resources that are currently, for most intents and purposes, free).
Even if a concrete solution to this issue is proposed, it’s not guaranteed that the folks who will no longer benefit from this search traffic will still be around by the time that solution is deployed: there are bills to pay and mouths to feed, so a lot of these people and companies might be forced into other fields (or into bankruptcy) before the dust settles and the micropayments (or whatever) start hitting their bank accounts.
That sucks for makers-of-things, for all the people who enjoy and benefit from the work of these makers-of-things, but also for the AI companies themselves, as their next generation models may be hobbled by the impending dearth of high-quality, non-AI-generated raw materials to harvest and ingest.