Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way in which people navigate the Internet and consume the information, thus eating the business to the news portals, which see their visits to the couple that their information is used as part of the responses of the chatbots and summaries of AI.
Until recently, looking for something on the Internet meant navigating between thousands of links to find the answer, but with the popularity of AI, search engines have advanced and now offer their own summary (generated with artificial intelligence and using existing information on the web), as is the case of Google Ai Overviews.
“Obviously, there has been a change in the process of discovering the news and we are in a transition to the ‘Click Zero’, which is that the information already reaches us without clicking on links,” explains José Mendoza, academic director and professor in business programs at the University of New York.
This, according to the expert, translates into “very important consequences for the media business”, since they depend on the traffic of Internet users that visit their portals to sell the ads of their website at a good price.
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Experts estimate that 68% of the internet activity starts in search engines and about 90% of searches are made in Google.
However, a recent study of the Pew Research Center said that when Internet users see a summary generated by an AI, such as AI Overviews, they are half probability of clicking on a Google link.
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The transition to the zero click by the IA Erosiona the News Portals Business Model
Robby Stein, vice president of Google Search, told EFE in the framework of Google I/or last May that users continue to have the option of reading the original article, since Internet users have next to the answers generated by the AI the links that have been used and can “click and deepen”.
The Brightadge data analysis firm analyzed the first year of AI Overviews and, although it came to the conclusion that total search impressions increased more than 49%, also discovered that clicks have decreased by 30% because users obtain their responses directly from the summary generated by AI.
In addition, the study indicated that the user, after seeing a response from the general description of AI, is more likely to close his session.
“Google is not being replaced; the rise of AI agents has created a new battlefield where visibility is no longer about rankings or clicks, but a presence in a new class of interfaces. Brands need to understand how and where the AI interprets.
Something that Mendoza coincides, who believes that it will not be a “catastrophe”, but “an adaptation model”, as the press did in other crises, such as the transition from paper to the portals or the rise of social networks.
Meanwhile, according to the expert, the media have to find business forms, such as agreeing to use licenses with the technological giants that are behind the most popular AI, offer their readers content that artificial intelligence cannot generate and think about subscriptions adapted to the different types of clients.
An example of the first strategy is The New York Times, which has a license agreement with Amazon.com, while an ongoing lawsuit against Microsoft and Openai for using its content to train its AI.
Mendoza also emphasizes that it will be easier to survive the media that publish content that AI cannot generate, as research journalism, opinion pieces, exclusive interviews or local information.
With EFE information.
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