Pew just released its findings that search engines incorporating AI responses in their results are killing clicks to websites.
Here are their key findings:
Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).
Users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary. This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results.
Websites that are feeding AI's results rely on click-through traffic and advertising/sales to keep their lights on.
Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimization strategy and research at the marketing agency Amsive, says,
AI Overviews are cutting into traffic so dramatically that many sites are seeing 20%, 30%, even 40% declines in their revenue. It's having a devastating impact, and removing the incentive for a lot of people to create high-quality content.
Google denies the accuracy of the research:
‘We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested,' a spokesperson for the company says. ‘This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed query set that is not representative of Search traffic.'
It's not just Pew that is getting these results.
There's also research here, here, here, and here.
They all show the same thing: as the number of AI overviews increase, click through decreases.
How long will it be before website visits decline so much that it's not financially viable to keep the internet open?
Unlike the replacement of other vintage technology platforms, however, the internet's replacement isn't superior to its predecessor.
Another recent study from the Colombian Journalism Review showed that those AI Overviews are incorrect a walloping 60% of the time, whereas the researchers' control for the experiment, a traditional search engine, was accurate 100% of the time.
And yet, users are so completely confident in AI's wrong answers, they don't click through to the source to check the information for themselves.
Just a reminder that using a computer program to tell you what is real is not a good life strategy.
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