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The departure of actress Sorcha Cusack from the BBC drama “Father Brown” in January garnered significant media attention, including coverage in Reach-owned publications such as The Mirror and the Daily Express.
However, the story’s online engagement fell short of the levels Reach newspapers would have anticipated based on previous trends, even from the beginning of the year.
Reach has attributed this decline to the impact of AI Overviews (AIO), Google’s AI-generated summaries displayed at the top of search results pages.
Instead of clicking through to the full story on a Reach news site, readers appear to be finding the AI overview sufficient for their needs.
This feature poses a concern for newspapers and other media publishers, who have already experienced substantial advertising revenue losses to social media platforms.
In a challenging market, referral traffic from Google search remains a crucial source of readership.
“A major worry, backed by some individual datapoints, has been that AI overviews would lead to fewer people clicking through to the content behind them, with negative knock-on effects for publishers,” states Dr. Felix Simon, a research fellow specializing in AI and news at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
He emphasizes the difficulty in fully assessing the impact of AI overviews without independent access to Google’s or publishers’ internal data regarding click-through rates.
DMG Media, the owner of MailOnline, Metro, and other publications, reported an alarming decline in click-through rates of up to 89% due to AIO, according to a statement submitted to the Competition and Markets Authority in July.
This situation raises concerns that publishers are not being adequately compensated for their journalistic work, according to David Higgerson, chief digital publisher at Reach.
“Publishers provide the accurate, timely, trustworthy content that basically fuels Google, and in return we get a click… that hopefully we can monetise to our subscription service.”
“Now with Google Overviews it’s reducing the need for somebody to click through to us in the first place, but for no financial benefit for the publisher.”
“It’s another example of the distributor of information not being the creator of information but taking all the financial reward for it.”
Further apprehension stems from Google’s new tool called AI Mode, which presents search results in a conversational format with considerably fewer links compared to traditional search layouts.
“If Google flips onto full AI Mode, and there is a big uptake in that…that [will be] completely quite devastating for the industry,” Mr. Higgerson warns.
“We are definitely moving into the era of lower clicks and lower referral traffic for publishers,” observes Stuart Forrest, global director of SEO digital publishing at Bauer Media.
“For most of the last decade Google has introduced more and more features into the SERP [Search Engine Results Page], which reduces the need for consumers to visit a website. That is the challenge that we as a sector face.”
Mr. Forrest clarifies that he hasn’t observed a discernable drop in traffic across Bauer’s sites, which include prominent brands such as Grazia and Empire, as a direct consequence of the overview feature. However, he acknowledges that this situation could evolve.
“I absolutely think that as time goes on, as consumers get used to these panels, it’s without doubt going to be a challenge. We are absolutely behaving as if we have to respond to that threat.”
Defending its position, a Google spokesperson stated: “More than any other company, Google prioritises sending traffic to the web, and we continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day.”
In an August blog post, Google’s head of search, Liz Reid, asserted that the volume of clicks directed from Google search to websites has remained “relatively stable” year-over-year.
She further noted a slight improvement in the quality of clicks compared to the previous year, defining “quality clicks” as those where the user does not immediately return to the search results page after clicking on a link.
“With AI Overviews, people are searching more and asking new questions that are often longer and more complex. In addition, with AI Overviews people are seeing more links on the page than before. More queries and more links mean more opportunities for websites to surface and get clicked,” she said in the blog.
Some members of the publishing industry are resorting to legal action seeking compensation.
In July, a coalition of organizations, including the Independent Publishers Alliance, tech justice non-profit Foxglove, and the campaign group Movement for an Open Web, filed a formal legal complaint with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority alleging that Google AI Overviews are utilizing publishers’ content to the detriment of newspapers.
The complaint urges the CMA to implement interim measures to prevent Google from “misusing” publisher content in AI-generated responses.
In the interim, publishers are actively seeking to understand how to effectively feature in AIO and, ideally, secure valuable click-throughs.
“Google doesn’t give us a manual on how to do it. We have to run tests and optimise copy in a way that doesn’t damage the primary purpose of the content, which is to satisfy a reader’s desire for information,” explains Mr. Higgerson.
“We need to make sure that it’s us being cited and not our rivals,” says Mr. Forrest. “Things like writing good quality content… it’s amazing the number of publishers that just give up on that.”
Like other publishers, Reach is exploring alternative strategies to drive traffic to its news platforms.
“We need to go and find where audiences are elsewhere and build relationships with them there. We’ve got millions of people who receive our alerts on WhatsApp,” Mr. Higgerson says.
“We’ve built newsletters. It’s all about giving people what they want when they’re on our website and our brand, so the next time they’re looking, hopefully they aren’t going to a third party to get to us.”
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