AI companies promised publishers their AI search engines would send them more readers via referral traffic. New data shows that’s not the case.
have made lofty claims that their AI-powered search engines, which scrape information from the web to generate summarized answers, will provide new sources of income for publishers by directing more readers to their sites. But the reality is starkly different — AI search engines send 96% less referral traffic to news sites and blogs than traditional Google search, per a new report by content licensing platform TollBit, shared exclusively with.
“We are seeing an influx of bots that are hammering these sites every time a user asks a question,” CEO Toshit Panigrahi told. “The amount of demand for publisher content is nontrivial.” TollBit, which integrates with publishers to track scraping and charge AI companies each time they do so, collected the data from publishers that have signed up on its platform for analytics, giving it insight into traffic and scraping activity on their sites.
Ian Crosby, a partner at law firm Susman Godfrey representing Chegg, said the practice will harm search companies like Google in the long run, resulting in an “AI slurry” if companies like Chegg are put out of business. “It is a threat to the internet,” he said. Travel booking sites like Kayak and TripAdvisor are also concerned about Google’s AI search overviews chipping away at traffic,reported. Meanwhile, news publishers have taken legal action against both OpenAI and Perplexity for allegedly infringing on their intellectual property.
Perplexity Google Search Ai Seo Tollbit
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