Photo credit, Getty Images
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- Author, Thomas Germain
- Role, BBC Future
During 2024, Google has made an adjustment and you have surely noticed it.
The first thing you see in research results is generally a response generated by artificial intelligence (AI), rather than the list of links that appeared before on Google.
The technological company calls for these responses from Chatbot “AI summaries”. “
Sometimes they are incredibly useful. Other times, in a moment of hallucination, they literally tell people to eat stones. Apparently, AI’s summaries also influence what you do next.
This year, 900 Americans who surf on the internet gave the Pew Research Center permission to follow their navigation. “These users were less likely to click on a link when they were doing a research generating an AI summary, and they were also more likely to end their navigation session”declares Aaron Smith, director of data laboratories at PEW.
According to a new analysis, Google users were almost twice as likely to click on additional links when they consulted AI summaries. And in 26% of cases, they simply closed the browser.
This is a very important thing. People in general use Google five billion times a year. This is where most activities online starts.
A large part of the websites derive their advertising income, in particular pages that provide information and content instead of selling products.
It is an ecosystem that lives and dies according to the size of the audience, and the vagaries of the Google algorithm can essentially destroy your business overnight.
Photo credit, Getty Images
“Most websites need Google traffic to continue working,” said Lily Ray, vice-president of the search and search engines to the AMSIVE marketing agency.
“But AI’s overviews reduce traffic so drastically that many sites record decreases of 20%, 30% and even 40% of their income. This has a devastating impact and prevents many people from creating high quality content.”
This could be a taste of what will happen, because Google has just launched a functionality called IA mode which completely eliminates traditional search results. Ray and a long list of experts say that the result will be catastrophic. Some fear that this will destroy the web as we know it.
Will AI destroy sites?
For Google, such fears are absurd: “We run billions of clicks to websites every day and have not observed a significant decrease in global web traffic, as suggested,” said a company spokesperson.
“This study uses an erroneous methodology and a biased set of queries that are not representative of research traffic.”
But Pew says he is confident in his research. “Our results are largely consistent with the independent studies carried out by web analysis companies,” said Smith.
Dozens of reports show that AI summaries reduce research traffic from 30% to 70%, depending on what users are looking for on Google. Ray claims that she checked her herself on the data from hundreds of websites.
But Google told the BBC that it should not be taken into account because, she says, it is poor research, biased data and meaningless anecdotes. The company says that web traffic fluctuates for many reasons and that the summaries of AI refer to a greater variety of sources and create new ways to discover websites.
Google’s spokesperson says AI’s answers are also of better quality because users spend more time on the sites they visit.
Ironically, Google’s own AI does not agree with its public relations department.
If you ask Google Gemini, he will tell you that the summaries of AI harm websites. And according to Ray, the evidence is clear: “Google tries to manipulate information and hide the truth because people are afraid,” he said.
The company says it is committed to showing transparency.
Photo credit, Getty Images
An AI that hallucinates
However, there is another question. Is this what we all want?
At least, this is what Google believes: “People opt for IA-based experiences, and AI features in search allow users to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities allowing people to connect to websites,” said Google spokesperson.
But for Ray, that is not the question.
“Google can say:” Well, no one wants to click “, but it benefits from the hard work that others do. This removes clicks from the people who created the content on which the prosperous Google AI,” he refutes.
Forget the websites, says Ray, the propensity of hallucinating AI means that it is worse for you too.
“The general descriptions of AI are often obviously false,” he said. “Not only is stealing traffic on websites, but it is almost like depriving the user of his ability to analyze different information, to choose what he wants to read and to draw his own conclusions.”
Google claims that IA research responses are useful and extremely objective, with precision comparable to that of other research functions.
It may be where we all agree. A little more comfort, a little less friction and, perhaps, a little less choice.
But if Google makes a mistake and websites are starting to disappear, it will not be because we have clicked on the wrong link. It will be because we have completely stopped click.
