Actually, the news on GenAI search isn’t bad for news companies

By Sonali Verma

INMA

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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We have heard for months about news publishers being worried about AI-generated overviews sapping their search traffic, which can be a substantial chunk of the total readership, often accounting for more than a third of it.

After all, if readers can get what they are looking for in a quick summary from a search engine, why would they click on a link to a publishers’ Web site?

I wrote in June about a flight to quality — that news consumers are going to choose trusted news sources that provide differentiated content over a generic answer that a search engine spits out.

Now, five months after Google introduced AI Overviews in search in the United States, a report by analytics provider Parse.ly finds GenAI search really has not had any major impact on search traffic to thousands of U.S. Web sites. 

“For publishers, Parse.ly data showed very little impact from AI search. Instead, Parse.ly data revealed gradual, long-term trends that predated the May 14 search changes and a continuation of those trends after that date. In fact, we saw very little effect due to specific Google changes.”

Source: Report titled “Analysing Parse.ly Client Traffic for Trends Related to Google AI Overviews in Search.”
Source: Report titled “Analysing Parse.ly Client Traffic for Trends Related to Google AI Overviews in Search.”

Overall, traffic declined by 14%. But: “The percentage of traffic across the Parse.ly network from Google referrals increased by 8%,” according to the report.

Source: Report titled “Analyzing Parse.ly Client Traffic for Trends Related to Google AI Overviews in Search.”
Source: Report titled “Analyzing Parse.ly Client Traffic for Trends Related to Google AI Overviews in Search.”

Ah, perhaps that makes sense, because Google had said it does not plan to provide GenAI search results for hard news. But surely sites that provide service journalism suffered declines in traffic since that is squarely in the purview of AI-generated search results?

Nope. “Parse.ly looked for Google AI-related changes in traffic based on the type of content publishers produced. Here, we didn’t find major changes.”

Source: Report titled “Analyzing Parse.ly Client Traffic for Trends Related to Google AI Overviews in Search.”
Source: Report titled “Analyzing Parse.ly Client Traffic for Trends Related to Google AI Overviews in Search.”

Even a company like Ziff Davis, which owns product-review brands such as CNET and PC Mag, is not being hit hard. Its CEO, Vivek Shah, noted when analysing thousands of queries across its key domains that generate organic search referrals, AI Overviews appeared in only 8% of the key search queries, with 92% of search results pages remaining unaffected, according to AdWeek.

“We hypothesise — and Google has confirmed — that links within AI overviews see higher click-through rates compared to traditional Web listing links,” Shah said. 

Chartbeat found something similar: Search traffic, still dominated by Google search, has remained relatively steady for its 700 U.S. news clients, while Google Discover, which offers personalised content recommendations, is increasingly becoming a top referrer, up 13% across Chartbeat clients since January 2023.

Where has the traffic decline been significant, then? “We saw the percentage of Facebook-referred traffic decline from a high of 14% in spring 2023 to about 6% in August,” the Parse.ly report found.

Also noteworthy: Referral site traffic from Bing has now surpassed that from X, formerly known as Twitter.

“With all this in mind, Parse.ly suggests that publishers may want to emphasise direct relationships with their readers, building a platform-agnostic business that is resilient against changes in algorithms from any of the major referral platforms,” the report concluded.

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About Sonali Verma

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