Google’s new AI search function, gradually being rolled out across the world, appears to be having a negative impact on the visibility of news sites, according to the latest study.
Consultancy Authoritas, which analysed 6,599 keywords, says the search will significantly alter how results pages work, making it harder to determine which page ranks number one.
The digital giant in May announced it is deploying Gemini, its AI, to provide answers, not links, to queries, which could mean a sharp fall in referrals via links to news articles from Google search.
The new search hasn’t reached Australia yet but it is being testing in the US and UK and is rolling out to other countries.
And the big fear is that news websites, which have spent years fine-tuning their articles and keywords to place them at the top of searches, will find themselves relegated to the second tier or disappear from the main search.
Marketers across a range of industries rely, to varying degree, on organic search as well boosting advertising.
Gartner forecast earlier this year that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 with search marketing losing market share to AI.
And the increasing volume of AI content will also compete with quality journalism, changing the nature of keyword search engine optimisation.
Authoritas CEO and founder Laurence O'Toole said his research found Google AI Overviews in six out of ten cases are linking to pages outside the top ten links in normal search results.
“This means AI Overviews are likely to have a dramatic impact on current search rankings and so publisher traffic,” he told the Press Gazette in the UK.
He found there is only a 38.5% chance that the number one organic ranking page also ranks number one in AI Overviews.
“These findings highlight that while there is some alignment, a significant portion of AI Overview results come from sources beyond the top organic rankings,” O'Toole wrote in his latest study.
However, Google believes publishers could do well from the new search.
“With AI Overviews, we’re seeing that people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions,” said Hema Budaraju, senior director, product management, search.
“And when people click from search result pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality for websites — meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the sites they visit Google.”
Google said it was testing the addition of links to relevant web pages directly within the text of AI Overviews.
“This experiment has shown early, positive results: Showing links to supporting web pages directly within AI Overviews is driving higher traffic to publisher sites,” said Budaraju.
“We’ll continue testing different ways of presenting information that’s most helpful for people, while prioritising approaches that drive traffic to relevant websites.”
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