It’s looking like time to sound two death knells. One for the demise of the simple Google search, and another for the entire journalism industry.
On Tuesday, Google announced a massive change to its homepage that’ll transforms the old-school search box, and with it, the entire web ecosystem. Going forward, it’ll be an “intelligent” search box that expands into a more chatbot-like experience that weaves together the company’s existing AI features.
The layout encourages you to ask lengthy questions like you would with a chatbot, and comes with an AI-powered autocomplete feature to help flesh out your thoughts. Questions like these will prompt the search box to show AI Overviews, Google’s AI-generated — and notoriously unreliable — summaries that appear above the actual search results. Since the search box is “designed to anticipate your intent,” Google claims, it can also expand into AI Mode, Google’s fully AI-powered search feature, allowing you to upload pictures and documents.
But the most consequential change is what the revamped searches will return. Instead of showing you a ranked list of links to other websites, you’ll get conversational-style answers. As is already happening with the years-long rollout of AI Overviews — plus AI chatbots broadly — this means even fewer people will be visiting the sites that the AI features are pilfering their answers from in the first place.
This is bad news for any business dependent on web traffic and ad revenue to keep the lights on, and it’s especially perilous for journalism, an industry that’s always had trouble keeping up in the internet age, when fewer people are willing to pay for access to information. Now that its product can be wholly regurgitated by a chatbot, it could spell the end for a vast swathe of publications.
One study, for example, found that that users are 58 percent less likely to click a link when an AI overview appears above it. Another report found that after the advent of AI Overviews, ten major tech news outlets lost as much as 97 percent of US web traffic from Google.
If fewer and fewer people are actually visiting news sites because an AI chatbot — or Google’s revamped AI search — regurgitates their content, how are these sites expected to stay afloat?
The answer: many in the industry are expecting that they won’t. A survey of hundreds of media leaders conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that on average, they predicted traffic to their websites to plummet by nearly half over the next three years. These fears have fueled layoffs across the industry, with some publishers embracing AI tools to speed up work.
What’s replacing journalism adds insult to injury. A recent analysis found that Google’s AI-generated summaries are accurate around 91 percent of the time. Across the trillions of search queries Google processes every year, that translates to tens of millions of inaccurate answers that Google’s AI is giving every hour.
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