As we stated, the technology’s ability to synthesize content could lead to a decrease in traditional page visits, affecting ad revenues critically. This is something that we’re already talked about, particularly because we’ve seen how traffic has dropped, and CTR keeps decreasing with time. According to the “2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Explorer“, a study by Contentsquare, 55% of websites across various industries experienced a decline in traffic in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Marc McCollum, chief innovation officer at Raptive, noted that about 25% of web traffic could construction email list be negatively affected by the new search features, which might result in significant revenue losses for content creators and publishers who rely on ad impressions, as presented by Michael Liedtke in his article. Shift in Publisher Dynamics The introduction of AI into Google’s search ecosystem has also altered its long-standing symbiotic relationship with content publishers.
By using their content to train its AI models, Google is essentially shifting value from publishers to its platforms, which McCollum describes as a “transfer of wealth” from small, independent businesses to larger tech corporations. Despite these concerns, Google’s testing has revealed that AI Overviews lead to an increase in searches, as users are prompted to ask more complex questions that were previously too challenging. “Because they suddenly can ask questions that were too hard before,” Liz Reid explained in an interview with The Associated Press.