World first study reveals who Google's AI search hurts most

A months-long investigation with five global publishers shows how news traffic will be impacted by Google's new AI Overviews...

It’s six months and a day since a whistleblower alerted me to the catastrophic risks coming with Google’s no-click search called SGE, since renamed AI Overviews.

You can track my posts since, but the warning was loud and clear.

“Publisher traffic will collapse, and ad revenue will crater, making it the greatest threat to the media industry since the dawn of the digital age.

“This is Google’s frightening vision of the future. It’s no more Mr Nice Google.”

Smart arse SEOs sniggered and knew better. CEOs looked the other way. I was subjected to Cassandra Complex yet again.

We need to get past this (remember Roland Orzabel?) but we can’t, can’t, can’t, give in.

What’s past is past, and the future still needs to be saved, so let’s focus on what we know, and what to do about it.

Today, in Future Media’s biggest investigation to date, I’m revealing the results of a collaboration with global publishers to analyse the impact AI Overviews will have on premium web traffic.

It’s the most comprehensive study into the implications of Google shifting its 91 per cent monopoly on search, into a zero, or few-click, model.

It’s a cash grab, an advertising Hail Mary, ahead of September’s antitrust case where the US Government will call on a judge to break the company up.

It leaves publishers on a tightrope for traffic and revenue, as AI Overviews turns 25 years of analytics and SEO on its head and renders much of it worthless.

To get to real numbers, I worked with Daily Mail, Trinity Mirror and Hearst, as well as Press Gazette in the UK and the US, and Mi-3 in Australia.

• We ran searches on news articles and products, across more than 3,000 keywords.

• We investigated traffic across 19 genres to assess the impact on news, sport, entertainment, health, food, and to assess how much views will fall for each.

• Searches were conducted across news articles, online retail, and magazines, to ensure the findings gave insights across a gamut of publisher earnings, and

• Searches were done across every day of the week, and at all hours.

Today, the first tranche of results can be revealed, and unusually for Future Media, this will be a paid post.

The justification is that this study was expensive and time consuming and it meets my policy of only charging for articles from which publishers can derive real revenue.