Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links (axios.com)
- Reference: 0184791796
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/07/31/1639202/publishers-are-losing-google-traffic-as-ai-answers-replace-links
- Source link: https://www.axios.com/2026/07/31/google-search-publishers-seo-geo-llms-ai
> Google has basically [2]stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data [3]shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right
[2] https://www.axios.com/2026/07/31/google-search-publishers-seo-geo-llms-ai
[3] https://www.axios.com/2026/03/17/chartbeat-search-traffic-ai-chatbots
I don't like AI answers (Score:2)
because you don't have any idea where it got its "facts" from.
With a link you can (roughly) judge the credibility of the source. I.e., did the "facts" come from published research or some nobody on social media. Or some known propaganda outlet.
Re: (Score:2)
GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. As AI increasingly becomes trained on AI output, it will be increasingly less connected to objective reality.
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> GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. As AI increasingly becomes trained on AI output, it will be increasingly less connected to objective reality.
Speaking of garbage in, am I confused or did Google just basically replace their for-profit advertiser revenue streams with..themselves? How exactly does Google make money using Google AI here?
The garbage out(put), might soon be the least of their concerns..
Re: I don't like AI answers (Score:2)
Won't be long before more obvious ads start appearing in the AI overview. They can continue their revenue without hugely increasing the advertising on page now. Which is ideal for them as now all ad revenue is theirs. I can't see anything that could go wrong with this.
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Haven't you heard? The AI business model is that now everybody makes a living doing each other's laundry.
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My experience with AI is that when it can't find the answer, it just makes one up instead of admitting it doesn't know the answer. Unfortunately, I have worked with people like that too. It is not productive.
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Google puts favicons of sites next to its answer, perplexity also links all the sources. If you need to know more, click the source links.
Google and duckduckgo just stupidly summarize the top search results (thus also amplifying bullshit in the results), perplexity follows more links than just the first level from the search results, but also adds citations to its claims.
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> If you need to know more, click the source links.
Do you actually do that often? I have, and many times the information in the summarized answer doesn't exist in any of the cited sources. I strongly suspect it's because the AI doesn't "know" where much of the answer truly came from, or even if it's real. It just "assumes" the top links are probably the source.
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Quite a few times, as the summaries generated are mostly just that, summaries. For more information you either read the related links or ask a full chatbot. People always say "Gemini sucks" and think of the box above their search results, but that's literally the result of their smallest model.
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This is just patently false.
Gemini answers are shit (Score:2)
Yesterday I got an unwanted Gemini result at work where I can't block them that wrote the word "covered" as "covered". That was fast from the only error as well. Public Gemini is clearly the most shit of all LLMs.
Re: Gemini answers are shit (Score:2)
> wrote the word "covered" as "covered"
Outrageous! Unthinkable! A degree of failure unparalleled in-.. wait, what?
Re: Gemini answers are shit (Score:2)
Ducking Google keyboard bullshit. I typed that how I wanted it in quotes and Google "corrected" it for me.
It spelled it C o v e r g e d
I already replaced my browser, now I have to replace my keyboard again? So irritating
Re: Gemini answers are shit (Score:2)
Looks like sooooomeone shouldnâ(TM)t be throwing stoooones
AI Answers Search (Score:3)
Search quality has dropped off so far over the past several years that it's almost useless. Too much AI slop out there, apparently. Gemini gives useful answers. I set up an agent that queries gemini and serves those results immediately then looks at what gemini says and does its own deeper search. There are usually significant differences and improvements with the deeper search. Or I can spend 20 minutes digging through forum posts and spam websites, trying to find the answers that might be eight links down or not there at all. It's a fucking mess.
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> Or I can spend 20 minutes digging through forum posts and spam websites, trying to find the answers that might be eight links down or not there at all.
...because they've configured the web server to let Google index everything but it's a paywall for humans.
Taken a while (Score:2)
...but we got there, Google is finally doing what ask.com was doing in the 2000's.
Account (Score:2)
Everyone's acting like Google stole something uniquely valuable.
The uncomfortable reality is that for most searches, people don't need your version of the answer. They need an answer. And that answer has already been written thousands of times by thousands of websites.
LLMs compress those thousands of near-identical explanations into one response. That's not a bug -- it's exactly what they're good at.
The SEO era rewarded being the 500th person to explain "What is X?" The AI era won't.
If your business
Re: Account (Score:2)
This is exactly what someone would say if they never produced any content of value
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Do you think the 101st answer for a question answered 100 times before is of value?
I think the parent phrased it right. You get now rewarded for contributing new knowledge, not for parroting something said a hundred times before. Providing something new unfortunately means you need to do more than just find one of the 100 answers, change the writing style and put your own sponsor links in the text to score online points. Maybe we get back to the old web, where people published online because they wanted to
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> This is exactly what someone would say if they never produced any content of value
The fact that this is unintentionally self-referential makes it even more funny.
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Recently, the search traffic to my website has decreased by roughly 10 to 20 times, and my well-researched original articles, which have not been published anywhere else, range from three to ten full pages, so Gemini cannot even summarize them properly. Some articles have been translated into multiple languages.
In the meantime Google removed me from the AdSense publisher program a couple of years ago, as they did with most Russian publishers. And they refuse to accept me back, even with a different account
AI gives better answers. (Score:4, Interesting)
If I need to know something and I search with Google it kind of sucks. Half of the articles are clickbait, written by non-experts or a shitty AI that was given a garbage prompt. When I go to the web site I immediately have to jump through as many as three popups about cookies. Then, ten seconds after I start reading, a full page popup appears compelling me to sign up for a mailing list. If I am on a mobile browser with an ad blocker the page may refuse to load. On desktop I might get a popup telling me to disable my ad blocker. After all that shit it turns out that the garbage article does not even answer my question. So I have to keep doing this with every link until I either find an answer or give up.
But if I ask Claude it will usually give me a great answer. Sometimes it gives an entire essay. The writing is much better than the garbage I would get from a Google search.
But lately I have taken to just looking it up in books. This month I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with the Oxford dictionaries of economics, finance and banking, and politics and international relations. It's great! Entries are short because Oxford is not cooking up five+ paragraph articles to put ads into. The writers were experts. And they were human. I still resort to Claude at times, and it can be faster, but I like ink on paper.
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Except the answer is often wrong.
For example, last year I was looking for info about a library that some old software we maintain every decade or so uses. The "AI" told me it was deprecated, but when I actually went through the search results it turned out there was some other library of a similar name which was now deprecated and end-of-life.
Without the search results you can't check to see whether what it told you us is true or misinterpretation or just plain made up.
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What is "the AI"? You need to specify the model (and version or at least date so one can estimate what version it was) for a useful critique.
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> Except the answer is often wrong.
You need more recent examples for how fast AI models improve. Try that search again and I bet you get a different result.
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Except they still do it. That was just a glaring example that sprang to mind.
Another example more recently is going around in circles trying to find out how to change some setting because the "AI" (Google, Bing, whatever) pulls instructions from two years ago and the UI has completely changed since then. Or maybe it just made up UI features that never existed.
Oh yeah, and then there was Copilot recently, I asked it to suggest an app which would do something, it told me there were two free Microsoft apps whi
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The first is a problem of information discovery/association, assuming that the correct information is out there. The second is a problem of Copilot not really being good at that type of thing, depending on the feature needed. And both can be exasperated by user incompetence (not saying you are, just in general).
Google AI is correct, for me, about 90% of the time. 9 out of the other 10% of times, it's simply because I forgot to be specific enough (generic Linux results instead of distro specific, for example
But most of those links are junk. (Score:2)
Follow a search link and you wind up on a page that has an opening summary paragraph sort of about the topic. Then goes on for 6 more paragraphs (with an image or two between each paragraph) that says the exact same thing as the summary using different wording while never actually offering any details about what brought you to the stupid page.
Slop ruined search links before AI, hard to care about someone not getting search hits anymore. I guess publishing is not a profitable business anymore - oh well. M
Google put an end to Clickbait (Score:5, Insightful)
If your article can be replaced with a three line summary, your article is not worth my click.
I would visit ... (Score:3)
... your site. But I'm tired of being yelled at for turning on enhanced tracking protection. Not blocking adds. I see Retool in my sleep by now. Just asking "Please don't track me."
People used to be skeptical of Wikipedia... (Score:2)
Now they seem to blindly trust AI.
You should still be skeptical of Wikipedia, but at least you can see a citation...unless there is none or the citation is unavailable.
AI threatens Click-Bait (Score:2)
oh no! AI is coming for my click-bait articles!
It's just another pebble on the "AI is good" side of the scale if you ask me.
If you care what happened on reddit (Score:2)
I can't believe how many of those AI summaries link to Reddit. Then you follow the link and its some random people asking questions with no good responses.
Seriously, follow those AI link they are garbage.
The AI summary might limits clicks but that does not make it good or right.
Traditional Search has long been useless (Score:2)
The results that come first aren't there because they're useful, but because the site's owners have gamed the algorithm to come first, and then surrounded that algo-gaming content with as many tangibly related advertisements as possible in the hope of generating some cash.
Having an LLM help parse through the bollocks has been a refreshing experience, honestly.
How Google "Owns" everything (Score:1)
Scrape enough of other peoples work and content, then, don't LINK to it. No need to visit the sites made by creators. Not when Google can monetize it to everyone with advertising. If searchers go to the original sites, then Google might have to share a bit of ad revenue. (Can't let that happen again!) They do it with photos/images, news... virtually everything. And sadly, most folks are happy for the convenience. Saves them time.
Ads and Bad Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
1) nobody wants to read an "article" that has more ads than content when researching a topic (yes, ablock exists for us techies and I have it, but talking in the more broad common person sense).
2) nobody wants to read a forum thread with over 100 posts to try to find the one post with the real answer surrounded by a collection of bad answers and people saying "YUP, IT WORKS NOW" with zero context otherwise.
Make your content on-topic and valuable, and users will return. it is as simple as that. These are just two of the main things I see as devauluation of a lot of these web sites complaining about a drop in traffic. They're most certainly not the ONLY reasons, but it is two of the major points!
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> what a hilarious take on the situation. yeah, the content is bad, the forum is bad so users NEED IT NOW! GIVE IT TO ME!!! ITS MINE!!!
> who cares how it got there? who cares what it took? JUST GIMME MORE NOW!!!
Sorry you feel that way, but it's a reasonable take on reality. There are two types of situations: Situations where you want to learn about X and situations where you need to know the answer to some very specific, but narrow question about X. For the second question, giant, ad-laden websites where the answer is buried in a pile of unrelated information are basically a disservice. You're paying for the information not just by watching their ads, but by wading through all the other crap.
In an ideal univers
Re: Ads and Bad Advice (Score:2)
Bollocks. Just spend more spamming your products or links everywhere. Or pay someone to guess whatever the current ranking system is to game it. Doesn't replace what is happening to traffic. AI is in almost every "people also ask" after the main search, a good portion of the time it still contradicts the links it uses as citations. Quality of site has little to do with it or sites like quora would be nowhere near the top.
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> 1) nobody wants to read an "article" that has more ads than content when researching a topic
And often, those ads cover the entire screen, and are four or five deep. If it - literally - takes me longer to close all the ads than to read the article, you deserve to go out of business.
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Those who put information on the internet do so on their own dime. They must pay for the hosting, not to mention whatever it took to come up with the content. They can't do that for free.
The ad model is a bad one and it is right in the middle of a continuing arms race. People hate the ads so they use ad blockers, and sites try to use ad-blocker-blockers, and people try to mentally train themselves to ignore the ads, and sites throw obnoxious ads right on top of the content you are reading (not to mention
Don't worry. They'll find a way to ruin AI, too. (Score:2)
> Make your content on-topic and valuable
Content is king. I tend to agree with you. However, I think anyone can look clear eyed the situation and see that "users" are going to do pretty much exactly as you say shortcut the content-slog with an AI answer. So, I'm still thinking web models for advertising are going to struggle as well as the web, in general.
Here's where I go off the reservation though. See, I loved the internet in the late 1990's. Everyone was going to get their own IP space. It was going to be theirs (because hey, we have 4B addr
Re:Ads and Bad Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
> nobody wants to read an "article" that has more ads than content when researching a topic
This. This right here is the answer.
Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites...then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays...and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional...you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.
and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.
You dug your own grave, Axios...when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons...but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I'll accept the tradeoff.
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You are mistaken in your analysis. It is only better for now, until enshitification lands you right back into ad hell, only it is much harder to block because it is all single-source with content you want, unlike ad networks that are separate and identifiable.
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What's the alternative? Glue on pizza? [1]https://dailydot.com/google-se... [dailydot.com]
[1] https://dailydot.com/google-search-results-reddit-pizza-glue-cheese