Google launched its AI-powered search engine, Search Generative Experience, in beta last May, sending publishers scrambling to prepare for a significant disruption in organic search traffic, with potential drops that they range from 20% to 60%, according to media and search executives. engine optimization experts interviewed for this story.
A decline in search traffic for publishers on the open web often translates into a decline in digital advertising revenue. Marc McCollum, executive vice president of innovation at Raptive, estimates that with the current SGE, the loss of ad revenue could reach $2 billion annually in the publishing industry.
Raptive, which does ad sales for titles like Half Baked Harvest, MacRumors and Stereogum, gets a significant percentage of its organic traffic from Google Search, according to McCollum. The company did not share details.
“When fully implemented, SGE could result in a 25% decrease in search traffic across its network of 5,000 publishers,” said McCollum. The travel and family verticals had the least favorable results, with a traffic loss of 29%, while the food vertical recorded a loss of 20%.
Meanwhile, other publishers are expecting a material decline in search traffic of more than 60 percent, a publishing executive told ADWEEK, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
In response, publishers are preparing to combat the anticipated impact of SGE traffic, including reworking their SEO strategies, investing in content insights, and diversifying traffic.
“Advertising remains the largest revenue generator for Google, across all Google and YouTube properties, and we can expect them to continue to design SGE to maximize that revenue,” said Nicole Greene, vice president analyst at Gartner. “Publishers must rethink the structure of their businesses, often focused on large investments and growth, and look to embrace changes in technology and consumer engagement by diversifying revenue streams beyond advertising to areas like paid models and events. This helps bring content to consumers where they’re most likely to engage.”
SGE is accessible to people in more than 120 countries, including the United States, India and Japan, where Google’s crawlers collect content from the Internet and provide fact-based opinions. However, not all keywords have an SGE response. Studying 23 tech industry websites last September, Land of seekers reported an aggregate organic traffic drop of between 18% and 64%. A total of 1,242 high-impact keywords were identified across the 23 websites, of which 8% did not have an SGE.
Raptive conducted its first analysis last September, with a follow-up in February, comparing Google’s current search experience with SGE for its top 1,000 keywords that drive traffic to its network of websites. Although some keywords do not return SGE results, some SGE answers include links to Raptive websites. Conversely, for other keywords, no links to Raptive websites were included in the SGE results. Using an internal program that calculates expected click-through rates, Raptive arrived at an average expected traffic loss.
“It is premature to estimate the traffic impact of our SGE experiment as we continue to rapidly evolve the user experience and design, including the way links are displayed,” a Google spokesperson told ADWEEK. “We will continue to prioritize approaches that deliver valuable traffic to publishers and show more links to SGE sites in search than before, creating new opportunities for content discovery.”
However, Raptive does not consider SGE results that appear on top of or in place of traditional organic linking as “new opportunities for content discovery,” McCollum said.
Traffic diversification and content insights
Publishers are increasingly looking to manage their intellectual property, either by legally defending it or monetizing their content, said Steven Read, chief product officer at adMarketplace.
A growing number of publishers, such as The Associated Press, have entered into licensing agreements with OpenAI for their data in exchange for compensation. Meanwhile, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over AI’s use of copyrighted content.
“Other publishers are also exploring options to sell [their] content through offerings with OpenAI or other large language models,” said Read.
Elsewhere, publishers are taking a pragmatic approach to their editorial strategy, diversifying into newsletter and subscription traffic and, in some cases, investing in their own generative AI chatbots to drive traffic.
Money.com gets 40% of its traffic from Google Search, according to CEO Greg Powel, a former Google employee. The publisher is reworking the format of its website by including content snippets deployed in a question-and-answer format, answering people’s questions related to a product or service, ultimately to increase SGE’s traffic.
“The idea is that Google can potentially track and feed that into SGE,” Powel said.
Meanwhile, publishers with less editorial flexibility are exploring paid search and social ads to drive traffic, McCollum said.
Collective Measures’ publisher clients are preparing for middle-funnel SGE inquiries, which include product and service comparison questions. They aim to rank for questions that SGE has not yet answered, as top-level query traffic is expected to decrease.
“It’s important to try to get into the SGE result, as well as rank for those things that SGE doesn’t show,” said Katie Tweedy, associate director of SEO and content marketing at Collective Measures.
Ultimately, it all depends on people’s behavior. In the SGE environment, ads are displayed at the bottom of the AI-generated response, unlike the current experience where sponsored ads typically appear at the top.
“Potentially, people won’t click on ads as much, and that cannibalizes Google’s revenue in a big way,” Powel said. “If Google makes a lot less money when they show SGEs, I’m going to hypothesize that maybe they don’t show them [SGE] for this query”.
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