Friday 15th December: A traffic-destroying nightmare before Christmas

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In the run up to the holidays, the Wall Street Journal has a horror story for anyone relying on search traffic. It is reporting that although Google says the final shape of its AI search product isn’t set, publishers have seen enough to estimate that they will lose between 20% and 40% of their Google-generated traffic.

While Google has said it is giving priority to publisher traffic, the tech giant’s adoption of AI in search threatens to throw off the ‘delicate equilibrium’ of the ‘long, uneasy marriage’ between Google and content creators. The fear is that AI search results will remove the need for users to click on links that take them to publisher sites, decimating referral traffic.

The new search features also present a challenge for Google, which has had to move quickly to retool its flagship product in response to the rising popularity of chatbots like ChatGPT. The changes to search risk undermining the commercial sustainability of the website owners that produce the content that Google relies on to deliver meaningful search results and, more recently, train its AI models. What a time to be alive!

In related news, Damian Radcliffe says that it’s time for publishers to think carefully about their platform positioning. This year has seen Big Tech progressively deprioritise news, cancel or reduce news-related programs and products, and make the presence of news content on their platforms much less user-friendly. Read Damian’s tips to plan your platform strategy for 2024.

Putting a more positive spin on the tech tsunami swamping media, Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt has been looking at how media companies have been training their own AI chatbots. Applications trained on publishers’ own content archives pose “a lot of revenue opportunities” according to the chief digital and information officer at Forbes. A silver lining?

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