Google’s AI Overview is destroying website traffic. We’ve been warning about this and now Cloudflare is confirming it.
It used to be that if you produced good quality content, people would happily enjoy and share your work across the web. In fact, this borrows from various maxims. Two of those maxims that come to mind are “content is kind” and “hard work pays off”. As a result of your hard work, you’ll get the traffic, subscriptions/ad revenue, and will be able to pursue a career in whatever it is you want to do. This held true with the internet as I experienced what it was like in the old days.
For me, while working for others (so, pre-2013), this is how the internet worked. I produced high quality content like I always did. It got shared on social media like Slashdot, Reddit, and Digg. As a result, the site I worked for got a huge chunk of traffic, ad revenue flowed, and it allowed me to continue writing content as my employers were able to get a nice chunk of change in the end. Everyone was happy.
The problems first arose around the first few years I started up my site. So, what ended up happening was some social media sites would intentionally only post up news content from larger websites. For some of them, they would receive posts with links to my site. The social media sites would hold that story in moderation. Then, they would wait for a larger news organization like Arstechnica, Huffington Post, or Wired to cover the story (sometimes even sourcing my site). Then, they would basically have that link shared on the front page. Then, they would take the submission with a link to my site and reject it, classifying it as spam afterwards. The larger sites get all the traffic and my site gets ripped off in the end as someone else enjoys the fruits of my labour.
This, of course, had a knock-on effect where sources stopped talking to me after. No one, in some people’s minds, was going to view my content when the can just talk to the bigger websites where their comments would get visibility. This basically kneecapped my ability to do my job, but I still had ways of getting scoops anyway despite this hurdle.
For other social media sites, they gradually dropped news links entirely. If you wanted to be put to the front page, your post had to be completely original and not link anywhere. It had to be exclusive to the social media site or it simply wasn’t going to get any visibility. This meant that trying to market yourself to these sites was pretty much impossible. If you look at numerous subreddits, many of them have rules against sharing content you produced in the ideology of ‘no self-promotion’. What’s more, what tends to get promoted are people asking questions or sharing memes rather than news links. It’s a very hostile environment for content creators unless you are simply giving away your work for free and expect nothing in return.
So, what does a website that produces high quality news content do in this situation where you face censorship wherever you go? Social media is generally off limits, so you rely on search engines because that is still a source where there is a lot of traffic. For a while, that is what I did simply because there wasn’t any other viable place for my site to get promoted. While Project Bernanke was likely suppressing my ad revenue, I figured that as long as I kept producing high quality content, something was going to give sooner or later and I would finally be able to break through the hurdles thrown at me.
A year ago, however, that began to change. This with the introduction of Google AI Overview. In short, Google would promote their AI “summary” of various web results and push the actual results further down the page. It doesn’t take a Search Engine Optimization genius to see what the results were going to be. While many of the AI hype examples running around at the time were basically bogus (such as AI ending humanity and making visual artists completely unnecessary by the end of 2024), this one was an actual very real threat to the open web.
In the months since then, website traffic to Freezenet began to plummet. I went from a promising 250 – 400 views per day to a barely scraping by with 50 – 75 views per day. This wasn’t an overnight light switch situation. The decline happened over the course of a year. Why click on a website where the authors worked hard to research and present quality information when you can just lazily read the AI results and not bother clicking on a single website at all? That’s ultimately what a lot of people ended up doing. The results are quite clear about that. In fact, earlier this year, Google was floating the AI only results where the links disappear completely and the AI simply provides you with the answers instead. You can bet that this worries the heck out of me because I literally have nowhere to turn to at that point.
I’ve been raising the alarm about this for quite some time now and I know I’m far from the only one noticing this as well. Recently, Cloudflare has run a general analysis of the situation and has come to the same conclusions I have been coming to for some time now. AI summaries and social media choking off news links has been absolutely destroying the open web from a traffic perspective. They are calling it a “zero click” internet which is another way of putting it. From Techspot:
Social media sites stopped promoting posts with links years ago, posting content directly on the platforms so users don’t have to leave them. With the advent of generative AI, people are having their queries answered directly on Google’s search page – no need to click on a website to find an answer.
Prince, boss of the CDN/security giant Cloudflare, spoke about the impact of a zero-click Internet during a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. “AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search. Search drives everything that happens online,” he said.
Prince also talked about how the value exchange between Google and those who create web content is disappearing. He noted that almost a decade ago, every two pages that Google scraped meant it would send websites a visitor. Today, it takes six scraped pages to get one visitor, despite the crawl rate not changing.
“Today, 75 percent of the queries get answered without you leaving Google,” the CEO revealed.
Charts posted on there shows that 58.5% of all search queries don’t leave the search engine after getting the answer from an AI search result. All that hard work people like myself put in ultimately doesn’t pay off in the end and this sentiment was echoed by the Cloudflare CEO:
The rise of large language models and the AI companies behind them has sent the crisis into overdrive, pushing the scraping-to-visitor ratio far above Google’s six to one. As such, creators see lower returns – and with so much AI scraping of content without permission, they often get nothing at all for their work.
“And so the business model of the web can’t survive unless there’s some change, because more and more the answers to the questions that you ask won’t lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source.”
I know some people out there love to bring up copyright and claim copyright infringement in this case, but copyright is not the right tool to fight this. It’s a losing battle simply because facts cannot be copyrighted. Summarizing another work is very clearly fair dealing/fair use (terminology varies between countries). If there is a way to fight this, copyright isn’t it.
Still, this is all a very real problem and I see the effects first hand. I don’t know what the solution is here other than begging people to support me through Patreon. If Google does, indeed, carry out their plans for AI only search results, I don’t know what the path forward would end up being.
