From The Register, June 22:
Turn out the lights, the internet is over
Google AI Overviews and other AI search services appear to be starving the hand that fed them.
Google's AI-generated summaries of web pages, officially released in May 2024, show up atop its search results pages so search users don't have to click through to the source website.
A year later, enterprise AI analytics biz BrightEdge reported that Google AI Overviews had generated more search impressions (up 49 percent), but click-throughs to the actual web sites dropped 30 percent
That means AI Overviews is leading more people to use Google Search to find answers to their queries. But those people are less likely to follow search results links that lead to the source website. Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of web sites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.
Kevin Indig, who writes about search engine optimization (SEO), marked the one-year anniversary of AI Overviews with a usability study. Based on data from the 70 individuals surveyed, he observed that when AI Overviews are absent, "outbound click rates rise to an average of 28 percent on desktop and 38 percent on mobile."
Ahrefs, an SEO site, in April said AI Overviews reduced clicks by about 35 percent.
Citing data provided by SimilarWeb (which SimilarWeb shared with El Reg, Barron's last week reported that search referrals to top US travel and tourism have fallen 20 percent year on year, while news and media sites saw search-driven traffic drop by 17 percent during that period.
Other categories of website also showed declining search referral traffic: e-commerce (-9 percent); finance (-7 percent); food/drink (- 7 percent); and lifestyle/fashion (-5 percent)....
....MUCH MORE
To paraphrase the quote attributed to Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, British Foreign Secretary:
The sites are going out all over the internet, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
Via the British National Archives:
....On 3 August 1914 Sir Edward Grey made his famous quote: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. He was speaking to his friend, the journalist John Alfred Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, in Grey’s room in the Foreign Office. Looking out from his window, across St. James’ Park, it was dusk and the first of the gas lights along the Mall were being lit. The next day Grey would have to face the Cabinet and to persuade them that the time had now come to declare war on Germany....
