Kimber Matherne’s quick cooking blog is a huge success: it generates millions of clicks per month.
But the Floridian mother of three says Google’s next feature – which incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) – threatens her livelihood. Approximately 40% of visits to its blog, Easy Family Recipes, arrive via the Google search engine which, for more than 20 years, has dominated the dissemination of information on the Internet, sending Internet users to hundreds every day. millions of websites.
Even before the Google I/O 2024 conference, which took place on Tuesday, creators like Mme Matherne were concerned about the AI capabilities being incorporated into the search engine. This “Search Generative Experience” (SGE) feature itself responds to searches with detailed answers that push links to other websites further down the page, where they are less likely to be seen.
This change risks shaking the very foundations of the web.
It threatens the survival of the millions of creators who depend on Google Search. Some experts fear that AI will strengthen the tech giant’s already strong hold on the internet, which would lead to the concentration of information in the hands of a few large companies.
PHOTO TAKEN FROM THE EASY FAMILY RECIPES SITE
According to Kimber Matherne, many readers find her cooking blog quickly through Google. If Google’s AI directly provides recipes, its traffic could suffer.
“Their goal is to make it easier for Internet users to find information,” explains M.me Matherne. But if we exclude the people who create this information – and who are the real human connection to this information – we hurt everyone. »
Obscure links
Google AI answers – overviews (previews) – are often paraphrases of websites. For example, the search “How to fix my leaking toilet” generates several tips, including “Tighten the tank bolts”. At the bottom of the answer, Google links to The Spruce, a DIY gardening site owned by publisher Dotdash Meredith, who also publishes Investopedia and Travel and Leisure. Google’s AI took a sentence from The Spruce word for word.
A spokesperson for Dotdash Meredith declined comment.
Links to sites are often half covered; you have to click to expand the box and see them all. It is not very clear whether this information comes from this or that link.
According to consultancy Gartner, site traffic from search engines will drop by 25% by 2026. Ross Hudgens, CEO of search engine optimization specialist Siege Media, puts the drop at 10%. at 20%, or even more for some publishers.
For some, it will be bloodletting.
Ross Hudgens, CEO of Siege Media
Raptive, which provides digital media, audience and advertising services to about 5,000 websites including Easy Family Recipes, estimates that adding AI to Google Search could cost creators about $2 billion, some sites losing up to two-thirds of their traffic. Raptive arrives at these numbers by analyzing thousands of keywords that populate its network and comparing traditional Google search and the pilot version of Google SGE.
According to Michael Sanchez, CEO of Raptive, the upcoming changes at Google could “cause considerable damage to the internet” as we know it. “Already, the rules of the game were not level […]. “It could tip to the point where it threatens the long-term survival of the open internet,” he said.
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Those who earn their living on the web are worried.
Jake Boly, a strength coach from Austin, Texas, spent three years building his training shoe review website. Last year, its traffic from Google dropped 96%. Google still seems to value his work and cites his page on AI-generated responses about shoes. But Internet users read the Google summary and no longer visit its site, deplores Mr. Boly.
My content is good enough to siphon and summarize, but not good enough to show up in normal search results, which puts bread on my table and keeps me afloat.
Jake Boly, who owns a specialist site reviewing training shoes
Google had already put AI into Google Translate, but really got going when Microsoft, its main competitor, added an AI bot to the Bing search engine in February 2023. Google Docs, video editing tools of YouTube and the Google voice assistant were then all equipped with AI.
These products put butter on the bread, but at Google, it is the search engine that generates the bread (57% of its 80 billion revenues in the first quarter of 2024). Over the years, search ads have provided it with the money to expand its other businesses (like YouTube and cloud storage) and to stay competitive by buying other companies.
Google has been showing its AI responses for the past year to a small percentage of its billions of users, in order to improve the technology. He often makes mistakes. A study published in April shows that Google’s AI provides wordy answers and sometimes misunderstands the question and makes up false answers.
Several lawsuits in progress
The rush toward generative AI risks causing legal problems. AI from OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft consumes millions of news articles, blogs, e-books, recipes, social media comments and Wikipedia pages that have been taken from the internet without paying their original authors or asking their permission.
OpenAI and Microsoft face multiple lawsuits over alleged theft of copyrighted works.
“If journalists acted like that among themselves, we would be talking about plagiarism,” says Frank Pine, editor-in-chief of MediaNews Group, which publishes dozens of newspapers in the United States. In April, several of the company’s newspapers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of pilfering their news articles to train their AI.
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