Danielle Coffey, chief executive of the News/Media Alliance, expressed deep concern over the potential impact. “This will be catastrophic to our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click through so that we can monetize our content,” Coffey told CNN.
The News/Media Alliance, representing over 2,200 news publishers, has been vocal about the challenges the AI boom poses to the media industry. In 2022, the organization released a white paper highlighting how Google’s practices harm the news sector.
“The little traffic we get today will be further diminished, and with a dominant search engine that’s cementing its market power, we once again have to adhere to their terms,” Coffey continued. “This time with a product that directly competes with our content, using our content to fuel it. This is a perverse twist on ‘innovation.'”
Google’s Response
Google has attempted to reassure publishers, claiming that users still click on the links that appear after the AI Overview summary and that this feature will spread traffic across a wider variety of websites. “As we expand this experience, we’ll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators,” Google stated in their announcement.
