There is good news on GenAI search

By Sonali Verma

INMA

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Aren’t you sick of bad news? Today’s newsletter is pleased to bring you positive developments from the world of GenAI. 

The first is about the loss of traffic that many publishers feared when Google and other search engines rolled out GenAI search results. 

The second is a quick look at two GenAI products that two European news brands have built that are solidly on trend when it comes to personalisation and chat products.

And — a sneak peek into the future — I’m going to be writing soon about our Los Angeles Tech and Innovation study tour, which takes a look at where the media industry is headed, hopefully with more sunshine. So, if someone shared this newsletter with you, please sign up to receive future editions yourself.

Sonali

GenAI search: Actually, it’s not bad news

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.

Date for the calendar: Wednesday, November 13

It’s our Generative AI Town Hall, open to the public, where we talk about what we have learned this year and what 2025 holds. Featuring excellent speakers and deep insights. Register now.

Reminder: Are you working on something interesting? I am always on the lookout for GenAI use cases to feature in this newsletter and on Webinars. Please get in touch!  

From Finland, with love: personalisation, chat products, and reader education

Did you miss INMA’s fabulous Media Innovation Week in Europe last month? We had an array of speakers on AI, talking not only about what their experiments are but also why they are undertaking them — and what challenges they face.

One theme that repeatedly popped up was personalisation. “Personalisation is now expected by the user,” as Rober Zilz, head of data at Germany’s Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (KStA), told conference attendees.

For customisation, Switzerland’s Ringier AG is playing with GenAI in many ways. The company has four chatbots running in parallel on different technology stacks. It has also created text-to-voice versions of articles with the cloned voices of journalists and is working on improving its storytelling by generating scripts, better suited for audio than text articles being read out, said Chief Product and Technology Officer Bernd Volf. 

Ringier decided any product that it builds would focus on three aspects: relevance for users, high quality, and uniqueness. 

“Uniqueness gets more and more important — we don’t want to copycat or just show data like Google does. We want to make something unique out of it and also increase the relevance there,” Volf said.

Where does one start? “We have a lot of data, and we need to produce a lot of content … especially when we talk about hyper-personalisation,” he said. 

Ringier ended up building a localised weather assistant that was launched in Slovakia a few weeks ago. Why weather? “It is very interesting for our users and you have a tremendous good amount of data for a long period of time,” Volf said.

Taken from Bernd Volf’s slides at INMA Media Innovation Week.
Taken from Bernd Volf’s slides at INMA Media Innovation Week.

Using GenAI, the weather assistant produces about 90 articles per day for 82 precise locations. Within the first two weeks, 7% of daily users were reading it consistently, Volf said. Ringier expects it to generate an increase of about 5% in pageviews.  

Taken from Bernd Volf’s slides at INMA Media Innovation Week.
Taken from Bernd Volf’s slides at INMA Media Innovation Week.

Next, Ringier plans to roll it out across 19 markets, with deeper, one-to-one personalisation, and consider monetisation. 

Another popular GenAI trend, which you have read about here before: chat products. 

This one comes from Italy’s RCS Mediagroup, publisher of newspapers such as Corriere della Sera.

“Our starting point was a challenging one: How can the product support the growth of 650,000 subscribers?” said Daniela Buoli, head of digital product. 

The news brand decided to offer the AI assistant in an app that is exclusively for Corriere della Sera subscribers. “The app ecosystem was the best way to develop a direct relationship with our users,” Buoli said. “We tried to develop an assistant that truly matters to our readers … . The audience no longer needs to go and browse the Web to find valuable answers.”

Readers received personalised answers, article summaries, and reading suggestions on different verticals. And if it cannot answer their questions, it connects them with a human expert.

Taken from Daniela Buoli’s slides at INMA Media Innovation Week.
Taken from Daniela Buoli’s slides at INMA Media Innovation Week.

Another objective was to create new touch points between the content and the readers.

Corriere followed two principles while building the product. The first was that it was focused on subscribers to promote meaningful loyalty and long-term engagement. The second was that it must be relevant and reliable — grounded in Corriere’s trusted archive, with relevant answers sourced from over 30,000 articles. 

The brand wanted to build “a powerful tool to match editorial priorities with the real interests and real questions of our audience,” such as which topics they care about and what they do not understand.

One hurdle: audience education. “People don’t know how and why to use an assistant to inform themselves,” she said.

Volf had a similar finding on GenAI: “The hardest part is really not building it. It’s getting people to use it.”

Worthwhile links

  • GenAI and Nobel Prizes: ICYMI: Two Nobels for AI work, in physics and chemistry
  • GenAI search and revenue: Advertisers are not quite confident about it.
  • GenAI and paywalls: Ringier’s Blick is planning to automate the teaser copy on an article that is presented to readers along with a request to pay.
  • GenAI and revenue-sharing: OpenAI does not plan to share ad revenue with publishers.
  • GenAI tools: A list of top picks from The Neuron.
  • GenAI and liability: This is your periodic reminder that GenAI still makes stuff up, and that could have adverse consequences for you.
  • GenAI and liability II: Also, this. A headline saying someone was charged with murder is libelous when it is actually someone else who was charged.
  • GenAI and hallucinations: Some prompting tips to prevent GenAI from confidently making stuff up.
  • GenAI and energy: Google strikes a deal for nuclear power to run its energy-hungry AI data centres.
  • An AI diversion: Man learns he is being dumped via AI summary of break-up texts on Apple phone. 

About this newsletter

Today’s newsletter is written by Sonali Verma, based in Toronto, and lead for the INMA Generative AI Initiative. Sonali will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of generative AI and how it relates to all areas of news media.

This newsletter is a public face of the Generative AI Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Sonali at sonali.verma@inma.org or connect with her on INMA’s Slack channel with thoughts, suggestions, and questions.

About Sonali Verma

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