The consensus that AI Overview is gutting web traffic to independent website is growing. Australian businesses share their experiences.
Way back on May 21st, 2024, I sounded the alarm about AI Overview. I knew straight away what the impact this would have on the open internet. AI Overview would summarize content and users would be less likely to click on links leading to third parties. That, in turn, would lead to a significant drop in traffic. At the time, I viewed it as utilizing basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) logic, but very few people at the time were openly concerned about the unveiling of the feature.
Fast forward to today and those words wind up being downright prophetic. Not only did traffic to Freezenet take an absolute beating – going from around 250-300 views per day all the way down to a meagre 50-75 views per day, but so did the rest of the entire internet. Subsequent research by CloudFlare confirmed what I warned about as they used the term “zero click” internet to describe how the internet is transforming thanks to AI Overview.
As more web owners stepped forward to confirm that they too have been hit by AI Overview, an anti-trust complaint was filed against Google over in Europe, saying, among other things, that Google was unjustly enriching themselves with this. After that, magazines, including Rolling Stone Magazine, sued Google in the US also citing unjust enrichment among other things in their anti-trust lawsuit.
All of this is, of course, leading to one common theme: the open web is dying and it is all thanks to AI Overview, and the followup product, AI Mode. AI Mode, of course, cuts out web results completely and only uses a handful of references that users need to click through to get. To pour even more fuel on the fire, Google, itself, admitted in court documents that the open web is, in fact, dying. It was a remarkable admission, though Google realized after the fact how that admission came off out of the context of the court case they are fighting in and issued statements rolling those comments back. They argued that this argument was made in regards to specific displays and that the rest of the internet is just fine and dandy.
Those arguments were unconvincing especially given that additional research concluded that web traffic to independent websites is falling off a cliff.
Now, if the evidence we provided, the studies we linked to, the Google admission, and the lawsuits aren’t enough, then maybe other people’s experiences might help drive home the point that the open web is absolutely getting killed right now. In a report out of Australia, Australian businesses are sharing their experiences on this whole thing. From ABC:
Mr Woolley’s marketing consultancy is one of many Australian businesses affected by what may be the most significant change to the web in 20 years.
The open web — the decades-old global public resource of millions of websites without paywalls, accessible via a standard browser, from news sites to small-business home pages — appears to be in decline.
Like many other businesses, Mr Woolley’s consultancy published useful content in order to attract customers to its site via Google search (a technique known as “content marketing”).
But since March this year, Google referral traffic to his website has “dropped off to a fraction of what it was”.
Rubbing salt into the wound, he recognises his own words in the AI summaries (partly trained on his content) that are now choking traffic to his website.
His business now publishes less freely available content.
Multiplied across the internet, decisions like his could accelerate the open web’s decline.
The report didn’t cite that one example, either. There were others as well:
Elliot Dean, director of Temerity Digital, a Melbourne-based web strategy agency, witnessed Overviews having a similar impact on some clients’ sites.
“For pages appearing in search results with an AI Overview, click-throughs have dropped 15–70 per cent,” he said.
Some publishers of news content also saw sharp falls in traffic.
The same pattern has been repeated in other countries with the rollout of AI search tools.
“It’s pretty brutal,” Kevin Indig, a US search engine optimisation (SEO ) expert with clients around the world, said.
“We’re seeing drops in traffic of 50 per cent.”
The fortunes of People Inc, the largest digital and print publisher in the US, with titles like Food & Wine and Better Homes & Gardens, illustrates business’ changing relationship with Google.
Several years ago, Google accounted for 90 per cent of traffic from the open web to People Inc websites. The tech company was integral to the publishers’ success.
Now that figure is in the “high 20s”, People Inc CEO Neil Vogel said at a tech conference in September.
Yeah, this problem isn’t going away any time soon. If anything, it seems like it only stands to get worse as AI only results continue to take over everything.
One of the things I started doing on Freezenet was create news content in video format. This is something I had planned to do for years, so the plan actually didn’t have AI Overview in mind. It was just a question of finding ways to raise sufficient funds to pay for software that would help me deliver a reasonable product to properly showcase the high quality journalism here. When I finally got to the point where I could launch this stuff, all of this was already going down. So, it felt like by launching the current iteration of my news channel, it was more like a life raft for my writing career more than anything else. Coincidentally enough, the third episode touched on the AI Overview mess among other problems. facing news sites today.
I think it’s important for websites who are experiencing these problems to step forward and saying that, yes, there is a problem. I get why some might not want to because they view the perception of having huge amounts of traffic as being too important (basically, an ego problem), but the reality is that as long as few are willing to speak out about these problems, Google will only be further emboldened to keep sucking the open internet dry of traffic, hoarding that traffic to themselves while everyone suffers.
At any rate, I am glad that these businesses have stepped forward, raised their hands, and said, “yes, I have suffered thanks to this”. It adds to the overwhelming consensus that AI Overview is destroying traffic to independent publishers. Even better would be additional legal pressure on Google as a result of all of this, but the first step in fixing a problem is to admit that there is a problem in the first place. It’s good that people are willing to do that.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
Discover more from Freezenet.ca
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
