Publishers Express Concerns Over Google’s New AI Search, Fearing Decreased Website Traffic

Google recently disclosed a significant update to its search engine. When users do searches online, information from diverse online sources gets summarized using AI models. The usual “ten blue links” structure of search results will get replaced with a limited number of links. Also, it will attach AI-generated text paragraphs at the top of the page with this new feature.

Currently, the AI-powered search is unavailable to the general public under beta testing. Many website publishers are concerned that their traffic will decline if this new search method becomes the standard.

The Reactions from Publishers

The present argument highlights an ongoing conflict that has recently arisen between Google and the indexed websites. Publishers of websites have always been afraid that Google may repeat their material in snippets on its website verbatim. Google is elevating things, however, with cutting-edge machine learning models. These models can scrape significant web sections to “train” the program to create words and reply like a person’s.

CEO of the website TechRaptor, which specializes in gaming news and reviews, Rutledge Daugette, claims that Google’s action disregards the interests of publishers and that their AI technology effectively lifts material. The Chief of Public Policy at Yelp and a longtime opponent of Google, Luther Lowe, assert that Google’s upgrade is a continuation of an ongoing plan to keep people on its website longer rather than sending them to the sources of information.

According to Search Engine Land, Google prioritizes AI-generated results above organic search results during testing.

CNBC earlier reported that Google planned to modify its search results page to give artificial intelligence-generated content priority. The Search Generative Experience (SGE) comes in an eye-catching, often green box.

Google claims that the data seen in the SGE results does not originate from the websites. Instead, it provides its own. The SGE strategy, according to Search Engine Land, is a better and a “healthier” method of connecting than Google’s Bard chatbot, which seldom connects back to publisher websites.

Some publishers are worried about their ability to stop AI companies like Google from using their content as training data for their models. The question of having the right to scrape online data for AI is still up for debate, even though certain businesses, like Stable Diffusion, are being sued by data owners.

The featured image is from searchenginejournal.com