Death of Clicks? AI Search Puts News Publishers on Life Support

Google is brewing a storm in the media landscape. For years, the tech giant has dominated internet searches, directing a river of web traffic towards news publishers, blogs, and other forms of web pages around the world. 

In May, Google launched Search Generative Experience, or SGE, an experimental version of its Search algorithm that integrates artificial intelligence answers directly into results. 

AI Threatens to Bypass Publishers, Leaving Headlines Clickless

The problem? Instead of spitting out a list of links, it generates its own summaries, potentially keeping users nestled within the Google result page, never venturing out to the actual articles on newsrooms and other websites. 

Although some Google executives said they intend to deploy AI search in such a way that it will continue to benefit journalism, a simulation carried out by the online magazine Atlantic suggested otherwise. 

The Atlantic modelled what would happen if Google integrated AI into search. It discovered that 75% of the time, the AI returned answers to the user’s query instead of the usual short summary and link to prompt a click-through traffic to the website. 

News publishers see this as the digital equivalent of a meteor hurtling towards their revenue streams. The anxieties are multifaceted, with many asking: 

Will AI summaries accurately reflect the nuances of complex stories? Will users even bother clicking through to the original source when they’ve already consumed the “digested” version? And, perhaps most pressingly, who gets paid for this content? 

Can Journalism Survive the Google AI Takeover?

News organizations invest a lot of resources into producing quality journalism, yet the AI model slurps it up for free, leaving them with nothing but digital crumbs.

Will AI be the death knell of journalism? We are far from reaching the answer. However, the potential impact of AI in journalism as a profession and business should not be ignored. 

It’s interesting to note that the media business is already pushing for fairer revenue-sharing deals with big tech firms as AI continue to permeate the space. 

Recently, a bill of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) was proposed in the United States to allow local news companies to negotiate with the likes of Google and Facebook and ensure fair and just compensation for repurposed news stories. 

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