Google’s AI search changes upended online publishing

PUBLISHER ARTICLE PREVIEW

From the original article

Publishers spent years figuring out how to get clicks on Google. But new AI search features have torn that ecosystem apart.

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The digital publishing industry has relied on Google for a very long time. Many outlets spent time and money optimizing their webpages to show up at the top of the search engine, with the goal of getting readers to click on their articles or discover their websites for the first time. For years, the relationship between Google and publishers was largely reciprocal; online publishers filled out Google’s search index with content, while Google supplied publications with exposure and traffic.

But that relationship has changed. The launch of Google’s AI search features — coupled with changes to the way it ranks search results — has made it harder for publishers to survive on traffic from Google alone. In 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews, a feature that slots an AI-generated search result summarizing pages from across the web at the very top of Google Search, with links to sources its AI system determines to be the most useful placed below the summary.

Instead of vying for clicks on the first page of Search, publishers became beholden to an AI system that regurgitates results, with no guarantee that users will actually click on the source of that information.