AI search could kill the web without new quality signals and revenue models

AI AND ML

Penance payments to websites for failing to forward traffic aren't enough

AI answers are killing content publishers, as they cause readers to stay on Google or on the chatbot of their choice, rather than navigating to dedicated websites. The end result could be catastrophic for the open web.

Alex Chan, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, floats that prediction based on an economic model he describes in a paper titled "AI and the collapse of the www."

A paper from Saharsh Agarwal, assistant professor at the Indian School of Business, and Ananya Sen, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University entitled "The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment," shows that Google AI Overviews "reduce outbound organic clicks by 39.8 percent and increase zero-click searches by 34.5 percent, without affecting sponsored clicks or overall search frequency."

A zero-click search...

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