Google is offering a trial run of AI only search results. This suggests that a further traffic squeeze for small sites could be on the horizon.
For years, we’ve seen the hype from AI doomers all over the place saying outrageous things like how AI is going to cause humanity to go extinct by, for instance, the end of 2024 or early 2025. We’ve constantly poured cold water on that hype by pointing out that generative AI is not even going to come close to that, but gullible media outlets seem to just lap up this obvious BS anyway seemingly in an effort to generate clicks from the fear mongering.
Another angle to the AI hype was how AI was going to mean the end of humans being able to write or create art. That never came to pass despite some companies trying to cram AI into everything whether consumers like it or not. The simple truth is AI is cluttered with problems such as the inability to distinguish fact from fiction among other things. This has even resulted in a number of people in multiple professions getting themselves into heaps of trouble when the work they created through AI produced completely fabricated “hallucinations”.
While a majority of the doomsday scenarios are produced by professional BS artists, there actually is one exception that we are aware of in the question of whether or not AI presents a threat at all. This revolves around Google’s AI Overview. The AI inserts itself into search results offering “summaries” of the content found throughout the web. While you’d think that summarizing content would be a much simpler task, even this proved difficult for Google as their AI produced bad answers anyway.
Quality of the answers or not, there is a very real threat to small independent websites. For a vast majority of websites, they get a majority of their content from organic search traffic. In fact, the concept of 80% of web traffic coming from Google isn’t really that outrageous in the first place (it might actually be a very common statistic). As a result, numerous public facing websites depend on Google search result traffic as people find their content through searches.
The problem is when Google “summarizes” that content on their own website. Why click through to the third party that did all the legwork to present that material when it’s sitting there right at the top of the search results? From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, this is very problematic for third party sites. While some erroneously claim that this is copyright infringement (you can’t copyright facts), that’s not to say this is problematic from the independent websites perspective. In fact, I raised all of this back in May of last year when Google debuted this feature. My big worry is how much everyone’s traffic could decline as a result of burying search results further down the page.
In the months since, my fears were very much justified. Before Overview was introduced, Freezenet was getting around 250 – 400 views per day. While some might look at those numbers and laugh, the thing to remember is that this was accomplished by myself without paid advertising all the while having a day job. As the site continued its great coverage of tech news, I was looking forward to seeing how modern gaming would impact the overall traffic.
That changed since Google introduced Overview to its search results. After its introduction, I gradually saw a decrease in traffic to the site. At first, the drops were small, but the lowering of traffic accelerated before finally settling down to about 50 – 80 views per day in the last month or so. I’m still not entirely sure the sites traffic will continue to get squeezed by Google, but this is where I’m at now.
The ad revenue as a result of this collapse has been noticeable. Freezenet was already seemingly hammered by Project Bernanke, but still pulling in enough ad revenue to pay for a good chunk of server costs. With Overview taking over search results, we’re only getting pennies per month. As a result, we are very dependent on Patreon revenue which has basically shouldered most of the ad revenue losses we faced.
Suffice to say, Overview is squeezing the life out of my site and it survives by pure resilience on my part.
Today, I’m learning that another shoe may be about to drop on this site. Word is that Google is testing AI only search results. Rather than burying search results lower on the search results page, the AI only answers eliminates web searches altogether by trying to ask for further questions as it conducts a “conversation” with the user. It’s currently offered for paying customers (why would you pay for that garbage in the first place?), but it seems to be coming. From Arstechnica:
Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning “to find things on the Internet.” Soon, Google might just tell you what’s on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won’t show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.
With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it’s only the start of Google’s plans for AI search.
Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It’s launching as an opt-in feature via Google’s Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far. The model uses “advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities” to build a response to your search, which can include web summaries, Knowledge Graph content, and shopping data. It’s essentially a bigger, more complex AI Overview.
Google insists this is not the end of web search, saying that helping people discover content online “remains central” to its approach. Indeed, the examples Google shows include links and citations from around the web similar to AI Overviews. However, you can’t just scroll down in AI Mode to see organic results. Instead, AI Mode is designed to operate in a conversational way, allowing you to refine your search or ask follow-up questions.
If this sounds like something you absolutely do not want, you can safely ignore it for now. The experimental feature is only available for Google One AI Premium subscribers, who pay $20 per month for access to Google’s best LLMs. This could be an indication that generating these search pages is extremely costly even for a company that gives away so much AI processing for free. Still, Google’s AI efforts move fast, and you could find yourself confronted with AI Mode soon. It only took a few months for the Search Generative Experience to graduate from Labs as AI Overviews.
Google notes that it still has a lot of work to do before AI Mode is ready for prime time—it’s a dramatic departure for a core part of the Google experience, after all. Google says the AI-only searches might not always be able to offer a good rundown. In those instances, it will fall back to showing you traditional links to websites that can answer your questions. AI Mode may also appear to take on a persona or form an opinion like a chatbot while it’s still in development.
for small independent websites, this is the stuff of nightmares. Not only is Overview going to be appearing in more results for more users, but putting out a service that eliminates organic search altogether is going to further hamper web developers out there thinking of starting up their own site or are already trying to make their dreams a reality. Even established websites are likely to be impacted by this.
Make no mistake, trying to start up a website in this day and age is hard as hell. You don’t have the benefit of establishing yourself in an era where writing something decent was enough to get your site off the ground. What’s more, you are entering into an extremely noisy environment where standing out in any way at all is extremely difficult with everyone jockeying for position to be the site that generates the clicks.
To be clear, for now, the AI only search results are offered to a limited number of users. Still, it makes sense that, sooner or later, it gets pushed to a wider portion of the audience before the search engine giant makes it mandatory. I guess this all means that we should enjoy the last moments of having scraps of traffic before that vanishes as well.
