The American media and content-publishing sectors are yet again grappling with the effects of a phenomenon, ominously termed a ‘Googlepocalypse’. The compelling implication is that if it is taking place in the US, its impact will soon be felt more globally. Furthermore, those who believe they won’t be affected by this are likely underestimating the impending culture clash – a clash that’s brewing between a small group of colossal firms vying for dominance in a world governed and manipulated by transformative AI technology.
A trial version of Google’s AI Overviews tool, driven by the company’s Gemini AI system, has already wreaked havoc on publishers’ organic search traffic and advertising revenue in America. This tool trawls the internet and presents a response to your search query, eliminating the need to click on any link. Consequently, certain publishers have reportedly experienced a drop of around 60 per cent in organic search traffic, equivalent to a loss of approximately $2 billion (or €1.8 billion) in advertising earnings.
This decrease in search traffic adds to the ongoing global drop in traffic directed from social media platforms. Statistics obtained by web analytics firm Chartbeat reveal that cumulative Facebook traffic to 792 news and media websites they were surveilling has dwindled by 50 per cent in the past year. Currently, Facebook referrals to media sites stand at just a quarter of the referral rate seen in 2018. Furthermore, Elon Musk’s choice to obscure visible links on X posts and systematically reduce the priority of posts with links in the platform’s targeted feed has resulted in a dramatic decrease in X referrals.
For those who are trying to find solace by dismissing Facebook and Twitter/X as outdated or irrelevant, it is worth noting that Instagram and TikTok were explicitly designed to keep their users within their apps, deliberately stifling outside referrals.
The demise of the link economy signifies the endpoint of an entire framework that fostered content creation and communication. The dwindling of social traffic is already encouraging media organisations to strenuously explore other modes of reaching their audiences, including newsletters and podcasts. However, these companies are still under enormous strain; indeed, thousands have already been laid off from the American media just this year.
The decision by social media platforms to step away from linking out to content makes complete sense. Google’s decision to move away from traditional search (or at least, as we’ve known it for the last twenty-five years) may appear more perplexing for a company that primarily profits from the sale of ad spaces on its own search results pages and as a go-between in the purchase and sale of online advertisements across the World Wide Web.
In some ways, AI Overviews is just the natural progression of services that we’re already acquainted with: brief excerpts of text that often render it unnecessary to visit the source of the information, or a search for a movie that provides you with local screening times without ever needing to exit the Google universe. This whittles away at Google’s longstanding rebuttal against claims that it was capitalising on the hard work of others. Google vehemently defended itself, claiming it was merely cataloguing the world’s information and redirecting attention to the creators of top-quality original content.
Google contends that it continues to steer traffic to the links it features beneath AI Overview’s results, but it isn’t putting much effort into counteracting the backlash, because it’s abundantly obvious what is transpiring. The supplanting of search indexes with AI-generated responses to questions has been accurately identified as an annihilation-level circumstance for a news-media industry that has battled for two decades to amplify audience reach via search and social media.
A significant number were conscious of the risks of depending on platforms over which they had zero control and whose goals often contradicted their own. Nevertheless, they believed they had no alternative. Many have endeavoured to pivot from the open web towards a subscription model, but without search and social sharing, how can prospective subscribers locate you? At the same time, sites that rely exclusively on advertising, from niche expert publishers to media conglomerates, witness their earnings rapidly deplete within a few months.
You may be curious why a tech giant like Google, boasting an almost monopolistic control in search and an authoritative stance in online advertising, would even consider silencing a profit-making venture. However, a grander scheme is in play. Dominating advanced AI presents the winner with the opportunity to evolve from a simple custodian of global information to an operator controlling access to it.
The era of the open web has concluded. Numerous people grieve the harm it inflicted on traditional revenue streams within the creative sectors. Nevertheless, its absence may be felt all the more when it eventually fades into oblivion.