News companies have been warned of a 'devastating impact' on online audiences as search results are replaced by AI summaries, after a new study claimed it caused up to 80 per cent fewer clickthroughs.
The threat posed by Google’s AI Overviews, which summarise a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of the concerns among media owners. Some regard it as an existential threat to outlets reliant on search result traffic.
AI summaries can give users all the information they seek without ever clicking through to the original source of the content. Meanwhile, search result links are pushed further down the page, lowering the number of users that find them.
Iona Silverman, IP and Media Partner at leading law firm Freeths, said: “This cannibalisation of content illustrates the importance of copyright protection."
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It comes as a new analysis by the Authoritas analytics company has found that a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79 per cent of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview.
As reported in The Guardian, the study also found that links to YouTube – owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet – were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK’s competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement the study was “inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions and analysis”, using outdated estimations and a set of searches that did not represent all the queries that would generate traffic for news websites.
“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,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day, and we have not seen dramatic drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.”
However, a second study also showed a big hit to referral traffic from Google AI Overviews. A month-long survey of almost 69,000 Google searches, run by the Pew Research Center, a US thinktank, found users only clicked a link under an AI summary once every 100 times.
A Google spokesperson said that study also used “flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of search traffic”.
Senior news executives say Google has repeatedly refused to share the data they need to calculate the impact of the use of AI summaries.
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Iona's statement continues: "AI is currently free riding on the efforts of others, but Governments seem unwilling to pass any legislation that might hamper the progress of AI, for fear that it will impact the economy. Over in the US, fresh off the press is the White House’s AI Action Plan, titled “Winning the Race”. It focusses on accelerating innovation, building American AI infrastructure and leading in international diplomacy and security. There is no mention of copyright protection or of the value of the content that AI learns from.
“In the UK, the Data (Use and Access) Bill has been subject of huge criticism from creatives such as Sir Elton John and Dua Lipa.
"They, and the House of Lords, wanted tech companies to declare their use of copyright material when training AI tools. However, the UK Government refused the amendment, saying it is carrying out a separate consultation on copyright. Ultimately, fear of holding back the economy or of falling behind other countries in the great AI race comes at the expense of creatives.”
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