News companies have been warned of a “devastating impact” on online audiences as search results are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) summaries, The Guardian reports, adding that a new study claims it is driving up to 80 percent fewer clicks. The threat posed by Google’s AI summaries, which summarize a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of concerns among media owners, according to the British newspaper. Some see it as an existential threat to media outlets that rely on search traffic.
AI summaries can give users all the information they are looking for without ever clicking through to the original source of the content. Meanwhile, search results links are pushed further down the page, reducing the number of users who find them.
A new analysis from analytics firm Authoritas has found that a website previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79 percent of its traffic for that query if the results were submitted under an AI overview. The research was presented as part of a legal complaint to the UK competition watchdog over the impact of Google AI Overviews. A Google spokesperson said in a statement that the study was “inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions and analysis,” using outdated estimates and a range of searches that did not represent all the queries that would generate traffic for news websites.