Media Owners Fear Impact of AI Search Summaries on Their Sites

News companies have been warned of a "devastating impact" on online audiences as search results are replaced by AI summaries, after a study found that these caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs.

- Michael Savage

The threat posed by Google's AI Overviews, which summarise a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of the concerns among media owners. Some regard it as an existential threat to outlets reliant on search result traffic.

AI summaries can give users all the information they seek without clicking through to the original source of the content. Meanwhile, search result links are pushed further down the page, lowering the number of users that find them.

A new analysis by the Authoritas analytics company has found that a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview.

The study also found that links to YouTube - owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet - were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK's competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews.