News sites, long reliant on search engines to pull in audiences, are scrambling to adjust to a world that no longer relies on people typing queries into the likes of Google.
Traffic to news sites is plummeting as AI chatbots increasingly answer users’ questions, reports the Wall Street Journal. Huffpost’s desktop and mobile websites saw traffic from organic search fall by more than half in the last three years, with the Washington Post faring only slightly better, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.
Such precipitous declines have consequences. Business Insider cut about 21 percent of its staff last month in an effort to “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control,” according to CEO Barbara Peng. Data from Similarweb shows organic search traffic to Business Insider plunged 55 percent since April 2022. Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said at a companywide meeting earlier this year that it should be assumed that traffic from Google would drop toward zero, necessitating a change in business model.
This stark prediction reflects Google’s increasing turn toward AI. Last year, it introduced AI Overviews, which provide summaries of search results at the top of the page. The rollout of AI Mode in the US last month, an effort to compete directly with products like Chat GPT, responds to user queries in a chatbot-style conversation – with far fewer links. “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” Thompson told the Wall Street Journal. “We have to develop new strategies.”
[See more: ChatGPT’s latest model refused an order to shut itself down]
This shift to click-free answers “is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated,” said William Lewis, the publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post. It’s not the first time the industry has felt the pinch from emerging technologies. The move to digital decimated once-lucrative print publications that relied on classifieds, advertising and subscription revenue. Social media platforms gave publishers a small boost, only to co-opt traffic and de-prioritise news. Search, a stalwart driver of traffic for more than a decade, is now falling to generative AI.
“AI was not the thing that was changing everything, but it will be going forward. It’s the last straw,” Neil Vogel, the chief executive of Dotdash Meredith, which is home to brands including People and Southern Living, told the Wall Street Journal.
Many news outlets are already contending with issues of declining public trust and fierce competition. At the same time, dwindling search traffic is pushing them to find new ways to connect with readers and build relationships to increase habitual traffic. The Atlantic improved its app, added more issues of the print magazine and increased investment in events, while DotdashMeredith is growing its traffic through newsletters and the MyRecipes recipe locker.
Some media companies are also taking AI startups to court – while signing deals with competitors. The large language models (LLMs) that underpin AI chatbots were trained on data from across the open web, including news articles. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, while also signing an AI licensing agreement with Amazon. Similarly, News Corp – parent company of the Wall Street Journal – signed a content deal with OpenAI even as it has a lawsuit pending against Perplexity.
