Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links (axios.com) 83
alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%.
Ads and Bad Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
1) nobody wants to read an "article" that has more ads than content when researching a topic (yes, ablock exists for us techies and I have it, but talking in the more broad common person sense).
2) nobody wants to read a forum thread with over 100 posts to try to find the one post with the real answer surrounded by a collection of bad answers and people saying "YUP, IT WORKS NOW" with zero context otherwise.
Make your content on-topic and valuable, and users will return. it is as simple as that. These are just two of the main things I see as devauluation of a lot of these web sites complaining about a drop in traffic. They're most certainly not the ONLY reasons, but it is two of the major points!
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what a hilarious take on the situation. yeah, the content is bad, the forum is bad so users NEED IT NOW! GIVE IT TO ME!!! ITS MINE!!!
who cares how it got there? who cares what it took? JUST GIMME MORE NOW!!!
Sorry you feel that way, but it's a reasonable take on reality. There are two types of situations: Situations where you want to learn about X and situations where you need to know the answer to some very specific, but narrow question about X. For the second question, giant, ad-laden websites where the answer is buried in a pile of unrelated information are basically a disservice. You're paying for the information not just by watching their ads, but by wading through all the other crap.
In an ideal univers
Re: Ads and Bad Advice (Score:2)
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1) nobody wants to read an "article" that has more ads than content when researching a topic
And often, those ads cover the entire screen, and are four or five deep. If it - literally - takes me longer to close all the ads than to read the article, you deserve to go out of business.
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Those who put information on the internet do so on their own dime. They must pay for the hosting, not to mention whatever it took to come up with the content. They can't do that for free.
The ad model is a bad one and it is right in the middle of a continuing arms race. People hate the ads so they use ad blockers, and sites try to use ad-blocker-blockers, and people try to mentally train themselves to ignore the ads, and sites throw obnoxious ads right on top of the content you are reading (not to mention
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What's your point? Since most web sites are completely useless now, the only difference between that and them going out of business is that I waste less time going to completely useless web sites.
Don't worry. They'll find a way to ruin AI, too. (Score:2)
Make your content on-topic and valuable
Content is king. I tend to agree with you. However, I think anyone can look clear eyed the situation and see that "users" are going to do pretty much exactly as you say shortcut the content-slog with an AI answer. So, I'm still thinking web models for advertising are going to struggle as well as the web, in general.
Here's where I go off the reservation though. See, I loved the internet in the late 1990's. Everyone was going to get their own IP space. It was going to be theirs (because hey, we have 4B addr
Re: Don't worry. They'll find a way to ruin AI, to (Score:2)
Re:Ads and Bad Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
nobody wants to read an "article" that has more ads than content when researching a topic
This. This right here is the answer.
Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites...then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays...and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional...you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.
and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.
You dug your own grave, Axios...when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons...but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I'll accept the tradeoff.
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Re: Ads and Bad Advice (Score:2)
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Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites
Google is responsible here. The could penalize websites that have too many ads. But they won't because that is how they make money.
It's a clear example of a monopoly making the world worse.
Re: Ads and Bad Advice (Score:2)
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"Solved it. Deleting."
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2) nobody wants to read a forum thread with over 100 posts to try to find the one post with the real answer surrounded by a collection of bad answers and people saying "YUP, IT WORKS NOW" with zero context otherwise.
This has been a solved problem for a long time with quite often the correct answer being highlighted or original posts updated. But that's beside the point. If you trust the AI answer, you're not going to click an article or a forum link regardless of whether they show ads or highlight a solution.
Though sometimes you do need to dig deeper. Google's AI never answered WHICH glue to use to keep cheese from sliding off a pizza, you'll need to actually read the reddit post for that.
Re: Ads and Bad Advice (Score:2)
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nope they won't. have zero ads on my site of 20+ years, plenty of content, but AI is just delivering the summaries on their platforms, nobody visits the source. AI is what google dreamt off when it launched their first google search frontpage, and have been working towards all this time, keeping people on google sites and not letting users visit other sites. GG: they won.
I don't like AI answers (Score:2, Insightful)
because you don't have any idea where it got its "facts" from.
With a link you can (roughly) judge the credibility of the source. I.e., did the "facts" come from published research or some nobody on social media. Or some known propaganda outlet.
Re: I don't like AI answers (Score:2)
I do not know if that's the case but it feels like the first answer is trying to save compute cost and gives you a shortcut answer, then if you challenge the bad answer it then goes deeper, with a higher compute cost, and with more data being processed you then are more likely to have a correct answer.
The current models are probably not adequate for the current compute costs. So even if the models are capable of good results, it will take a few more years for the models to be more efficient and the hardware
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GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. As AI increasingly becomes trained on AI output, it will be increasingly less connected to objective reality.
Speaking of garbage in, am I confused or did Google just basically replace their for-profit advertiser revenue streams with..themselves? How exactly does Google make money using Google AI here?
The garbage out(put), might soon be the least of their concerns..
Re: I don't like AI answers (Score:2)
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Google puts favicons of sites next to its answer, perplexity also links all the sources. If you need to know more, click the source links.
Google and duckduckgo just stupidly summarize the top search results (thus also amplifying bullshit in the results), perplexity follows more links than just the first level from the search results, but also adds citations to its claims.
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> If you need to know more, click the source links.
Do you actually do that often? I have, and many times the information in the summarized answer doesn't exist in any of the cited sources. I strongly suspect it's because the AI doesn't "know" where much of the answer truly came from, or even if it's real. It just "assumes" the top links are probably the source.
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Quite a few times, as the summaries generated are mostly just that, summaries. For more information you either read the related links or ask a full chatbot. People always say "Gemini sucks" and think of the box above their search results, but that's literally the result of their smallest model.
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This is just patently false.
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Exactly. And AI "Answers" keep telling me the most ridiculous crap. I think it must be something like > 30% hallucination for the things I search.
Example: It gave me melting points for a plastic at 100C and 350C, both (!) in the same posting. The real value for that plastic is around 215C. Completely unusable.
Gemini answers are shit (Score:2)
Yesterday I got an unwanted Gemini result at work where I can't block them that wrote the word "covered" as "covered". That was fast from the only error as well. Public Gemini is clearly the most shit of all LLMs.
Re: Gemini answers are shit (Score:4)
wrote the word "covered" as "covered"
Outrageous! Unthinkable! A degree of failure unparalleled in-.. wait, what?
Re: Gemini answers are shit (Score:2)
Ducking Google keyboard bullshit. I typed that how I wanted it in quotes and Google "corrected" it for me.
It spelled it C o v e r g e d
I already replaced my browser, now I have to replace my keyboard again? So irritating
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Did you mean: converged?
No. It literally wrote it "coverged". Now that I'm at my desktop I can just write it.
Also, the correct word is COVERED so even if it did write "converged" that would have been incorrect. But it didn't. Instead it wrote something that isn't even a word. That is the level to which Google has fallen.
Re: Gemini answers are shit (Score:2)
Looks like sooooomeone shouldnâ(TM)t be throwing stoooones
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Looks like sooooomeone shouldnÃ(TM)t be throwing stoooones
You mean people confused by multiple mouse buttons who can't figure out how to configure Safari?
AI Answers Search (Score:3)
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...because they've configured the web server to let Google index everything but it's a paywall for humans.
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The only issue , though, is as we go forward. The quality of results will fall off. If a website or forum can't get anything but AI scouring it, they'll simply cease to exist, and AI output ( based on input) will fall off considerably.
Taken a while (Score:2)
...but we got there, Google is finally doing what ask.com was doing in the 2000's.
Account (Score:2)
Everyone's acting like Google stole something uniquely valuable.
The uncomfortable reality is that for most searches, people don't need your version of the answer. They need an answer. And that answer has already been written thousands of times by thousands of websites.
LLMs compress those thousands of near-identical explanations into one response. That's not a bug -- it's exactly what they're good at.
The SEO era rewarded being the 500th person to explain "What is X?" The AI era won't.
If your business
Re: Account (Score:2)
This is exactly what someone would say if they never produced any content of value
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Do you think the 101st answer for a question answered 100 times before is of value?
I think the parent phrased it right. You get now rewarded for contributing new knowledge, not for parroting something said a hundred times before. Providing something new unfortunately means you need to do more than just find one of the 100 answers, change the writing style and put your own sponsor links in the text to score online points. Maybe we get back to the old web, where people published online because they wanted to
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This is exactly what someone would say if they never produced any content of value
The fact that this is unintentionally self-referential makes it even more funny.
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Recently, the search traffic to my website has decreased by roughly 10 to 20 times, and my well-researched original articles, which have not been published anywhere else, range from three to ten full pages, so Gemini cannot even summarize them properly. Some articles have been translated into multiple languages.
In the meantime Google removed me from the AdSense publisher program a couple of years ago, as they did with most Russian publishers. And they refuse to accept me back, even with a different account
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except: why produce anything of value if AI is simply going to suck it up and reserve it to people? Why spend time on "original reporting, proprietary data, real expertise, or genuinely distinctive analysis" if in the end, everyone will ask AI and AI will repackage your work?
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If what you create/publish can be presented as a three-line AI summary, it may not be worthy content.
AI gives better answers. (Score:5, Interesting)
If I need to know something and I search with Google it kind of sucks. Half of the articles are clickbait, written by non-experts or a shitty AI that was given a garbage prompt. When I go to the web site I immediately have to jump through as many as three popups about cookies. Then, ten seconds after I start reading, a full page popup appears compelling me to sign up for a mailing list. If I am on a mobile browser with an ad blocker the page may refuse to load. On desktop I might get a popup telling me to disable my ad blocker. After all that shit it turns out that the garbage article does not even answer my question. So I have to keep doing this with every link until I either find an answer or give up.
But if I ask Claude it will usually give me a great answer. Sometimes it gives an entire essay. The writing is much better than the garbage I would get from a Google search.
But lately I have taken to just looking it up in books. This month I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with the Oxford dictionaries of economics, finance and banking, and politics and international relations. It's great! Entries are short because Oxford is not cooking up five+ paragraph articles to put ads into. The writers were experts. And they were human. I still resort to Claude at times, and it can be faster, but I like ink on paper.
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Except the answer is often wrong.
For example, last year I was looking for info about a library that some old software we maintain every decade or so uses. The "AI" told me it was deprecated, but when I actually went through the search results it turned out there was some other library of a similar name which was now deprecated and end-of-life.
Without the search results you can't check to see whether what it told you us is true or misinterpretation or just plain made up.
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What is "the AI"? You need to specify the model (and version or at least date so one can estimate what version it was) for a useful critique.
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Except the answer is often wrong.
You need more recent examples for how fast AI models improve. Try that search again and I bet you get a different result.
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Except they still do it. That was just a glaring example that sprang to mind.
Another example more recently is going around in circles trying to find out how to change some setting because the "AI" (Google, Bing, whatever) pulls instructions from two years ago and the UI has completely changed since then. Or maybe it just made up UI features that never existed.
Oh yeah, and then there was Copilot recently, I asked it to suggest an app which would do something, it told me there were two free Microsoft apps whi
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The first is a problem of information discovery/association, assuming that the correct information is out there. The second is a problem of Copilot not really being good at that type of thing, depending on the feature needed. And both can be exasperated by user incompetence (not saying you are, just in general).
Google AI is correct, for me, about 90% of the time. 9 out of the other 10% of times, it's simply because I forgot to be specific enough (generic Linux results instead of distro specific, for example
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What's so bad about RTFM to find a setting? AI is good for finding solutions and good for well-established knowledge (at least larger models). Things like where exactly an UI setting is, is neither. The problem starts with how often this is in the training data. You hopefully find it in TFM. Mostly that's it. How many sites do you know, that tell you where to find that setting, except the manual? Where should the knowledge come from, when it is that rare on the web and possibly not even in the training set?
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I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with...
You may be an exception. The books you mentioned are reference books. I am worried that reference books will disappear, because most people won't use them. Which means that we will be at the mercy of getting our information from AI.
Reference book publishers might publish their books through an LLM: you can ask questions but nobody gets the whole book.
But most of those links are junk. (Score:2)
Slop ruined search links before AI, hard to care about someone not getting search hits anymore. I guess publishing is not a profitable business anymore - oh well. M
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Google put an end to Clickbait (Score:5, Insightful)
If your article can be replaced with a three line summary, your article is not worth my click.
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Now the real question: If the article didn't exist, where will Google get it's summary from?
I get your complaint, but you should really consider the end game here.
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Hopefully from a better site. Even though it may contain a bit of information buried under a lot of fluff and ads, the information in clickbait articles is at least second hand, usually some common knowledge or even urban legends. I'd rather have a google result page with only one result but that's the primary source, than a page full of different sites paraphrasing the original information and reshaping it such that it better fits the own site or provokes more clicks.
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Addendum: you may say "But what if there is no primary source?!"
This sounds like a problem in the first moment, but if you look a primary sources, they are rarely put on sites that try to foremost get ad clicks, but rather on boring sites that convey the information straightforward without hyping it.
News: Computers now faster
Clickbait: Ten reasons why computers are now faster!
Source: Intel's describes its new microarchitecture
Summary: The newest architecture of Intel processors allows faster matrix multipli
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Google is in a strange position there. They profit from the 8 minute video, but then put a generated summary below it, that can cut it short. And I think you can just put a Youtube Link in Gemini to get a full transcript.
I would visit ... (Score:3)
People used to be skeptical of Wikipedia... (Score:2)
Now they seem to blindly trust AI.
You should still be skeptical of Wikipedia, but at least you can see a citation...unless there is none or the citation is unavailable.
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Wikipedia is at least right most the time. The problem is they were trusting the first Google result, even when it was Infowars.
AI threatens Click-Bait (Score:2)
oh no! AI is coming for my click-bait articles!
It's just another pebble on the "AI is good" side of the scale if you ask me.
If you care what happened on reddit (Score:3)
I can't believe how many of those AI summaries link to Reddit. Then you follow the link and its some random people asking questions with no good responses.
Seriously, follow those AI link they are garbage.
The AI summary might limits clicks but that does not make it good or right.
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Unfortunately Reddit seems to have a trust bonus. Google clearly has some whitelist with sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, Stackexchange, etc. that they favor for queries that might have an answer there, drowning the sites that have a more in-depth answer on that topic.
Traditional Search has long been useless (Score:2)
The results that come first aren't there because they're useful, but because the site's owners have gamed the algorithm to come first, and then surrounded that algo-gaming content with as many tangibly related advertisements as possible in the hope of generating some cash.
Having an LLM help parse through the bollocks has been a refreshing experience, honestly.
How Google "Owns" everything (Score:1)
Normal (Score:2)
I stopped using Google over a year ago, since first it delivers too many 'sponsored' links and the rest are links that it THINKS I want, instead of reading what I actually wrote.
Then I would have to read all those results for the data i need.
AI does all the searching, reading and extracting the data without any work from my side, it formats it exactly to my needs to paste into my research/projects/whatever.
Google is dead to me.
Good, fuck those ad peddlers (Score:3)
For several years now, any reasonable simple question has had Search-Engine-Optimized useless shit at the top of google- these days it generally can be counted on to fill the entire first page. Google helpfully highlights the relevant text by default so they spend money making sure google can't displau that text but instead displays an ad.
I just googled:
odds of rolling three sixes on three dice
The AI has the 1/216 answer and the reasoning and the math and the links to the people on forums explaining all that. That is actually the search engine right there; it actually links me to people who have explained this to each other over the years.
The top link is to reddit and claims the odds are "180 to where", and eventually has a bunch of links (reddit and google signed an agreement to stop other search engines from reading reddit well). If I click in there I will find the answer. But what if it wasn't?
Under that is stackexchange, and all the wording is chosen so I can't see the answer. Clicking through the answer is present at least. Below that is a dice probability calculator that can make the answer, and something called thoughtco which has the answer in the summary. This is the first non-AI spot on the page with the answer.
Overall the AI summary has been godsent, but if more time has been spent fighting SEO it would not be so needed.
Google is trying to front run the alternative (Score:2)