Publishers Worry A.I. Chatbots Will Slash Readership

Content publishers have an uneven but largely reciprocal relationship with search engines. The search sites benefit from having trusted sources of information in the results, and the publishers benefit from the traffic to their sites that the search engines generate.

Search traffic from Google accounts for half of overall visits, or more, to many sites, said Brian Morrissey, who writes The Rebooting, a media business newsletter.

“Search has been the mainstay of the publishing business on the internet,” he said.

Kyle Sutton, director of search and product at the newspaper publisher Gannett, said the relationship had, until now, been mutually beneficial.

“While all search results are taking from our data and, from our perspective, crawling our content, aggregating our content, there is the return there of them driving traffic to our site,” Mr. Sutton said. “So I think that relationship is kind of first and foremost what we want to see maintained.”

The new offerings could change all of that, said Barbara Peng, the president of the digital news brand Insider. Microsoft is incorporating the chatbot into Bing, its search engine. Google’s search chatbot, Bard, is separate from its main search engine.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/business/media/publishers-chatbots-search-engines.html