AI search engines drive 96% less traffic than traditional ones, posing as an impediment for content creators
“AI search engines significantly influence businesses that solely rely on search engine traffic,” said Chegg‘s CEO. And Schultz’s warning was a product of the repercussions Chegg had to face after Google announced its AI-generated summaries. Its website traffic had declined by over 49%.
Introducing AI in this space has disrupted the harmony between content creators and search engines. A TollBit report, shared exclusively with Forbes, asserted that AI firms send 96% less referral traffic to publishing sites than the conventional Google search engine.
This is a total detour from the promises AI firms had proposed – tech innovations will open newer revenue passages for publishers.
Instead, the data suggests that AI developers such as Perplexity and OpenAI have boosted their web scraping activities. The bots scrap a page over 7 times when a user asks a question.
How do publishers now study the demand for their content? It’s become quite non-essential. When these AI-driven search engines scrap the web, there’s an absolute lack of transparency. What exactly are their methods to access content?
Perplexity had also been previously hacked for republishing paywalled content from Forbes and Bloomberg without proper acknowledgment.
From AI-generated blogs and low-quality content to republishing without any fair compensation, what could be the way forward?
This discontinuity that AI has caused between content creators, publishers, and their referral traffic could be here to stay. AI-driven search engines are not going away anytime soon. There’s a need for clear frameworks to safeguard content creators and their hard work.
As an increasing number of users move to AI search engines and research software, it’s time to seek a balance between innovation and compensation where it’s due.