Ever since the arrival of ChatGPT, AI search war has witnessed a fierce competition. With ChatGPT’s explosive rise, Google had no option other than to provide AI-powered answers in conversational style just like its rival. Google call this feature AI Overview and it usually does the job intended to do so.
However, with so much relevant and personalized answer, searchers may have less incentive to visit the publisher’s site from where the AI overview has taken the information and summarized it neatly. And the acknowlegdement of this is coming from AI itself, specifically from ChatGPT.
We asked ChatGPT if “How will Google’s multi-source overviews impact digital news publishers’ traffic and revenue?” and ChatGPT replied that such a feature could significantly hamper publisher’s earnings.
We asked whether this problem is only with Google’s AI overviews or with other conversational style search engines also that provides instant answers in the form of summaries. ChatGPT admitted that Google’s AI overview is not the only culprit which could hamper publisher’s revenue with its AI answers.
As per ChatGPT, publishers could face problems related to Decreased Click-Through Rates and Traffic Loss, Lower Engagement Metrics, Impact on Ad Revenue, Subscription and Conversion Challenges and for Content Ownership and Attribution Concerns.
We asked Perplexity also the same question and it too answers the same that there will be decrease in visibility of publisher’s link which may entice the user to check out the source of information.
Exchange4media talked on the similar topic and contacted a COO of one of the leading publishers who replied that Google wants to avoid being perceived as biased to some publishers.
Long Term Solution for Digital Publishers
ChatGPT itself suggested that it order to remain unaffected from traffic loss and revenue, publishers may have to resort to licensing deals and subscription models. There have been news that the likes of ChatGPT and even Perplexity have begun to license deals with some of the most reputed publishers in order to train their AI agents on their huge online content published throughout the years.
Its ironic that the efficiency of such AI-powered conversational style search engine like ChatGPT and Perplexity lies with high-quality data on which they have been accused in the past to train their agents on them without consent and for free.