The Scoop: How newsrooms are reckoning with Google’s AI changes

Google is a major component of most news outlets’ business models. For some, half their website traffic may come through Google search — and advertising dollars are often directly tied to that traffic.

But the search giant’s pivot to AI could threaten that — and the revenue that comes with it.

“It potentially chokes off the original creators of the content,” Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, told the New York Times.

Renn Turiano, head of product at Gannett, agreed, saying that the new AI summaries are “greatly detrimental to everyone apart from Google, but especially to consumers, smaller publishers and businesses large and small that use search results.”

Read more: What Google’s AI revamp means for content marketing

Google, for its part, claims that the summaries of common search queries will be a traffic boon to publishers. Getting placement in that AI summary can lead to more traffic than a site would receive from someone simply clicking on a search result, the company says.

All of this comes against a backdrop of media organizations alternately suing and striking publishing deals with AI companies, most notably OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. While the Times is suing OpenAI, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal as well as The Atlantic have signed lucrative agreements to allow LLMs to train on their content.

Other companies are focusing on areas where they can control the relationship to the customer rather than being beholden to the whims of algorithms. Think email newsletters and text messaging. Others still are looking for Congress to save them with regulation.

But even those striking deals with LLMs seem resigned to a new reality.

“We know traffic will go down as Google makes this transition,” Nicholas Thompson, the chief executive of The Atlantic said, “but I think that being part of the new product will help us minimize how much it goes down.”

Why it matters:

We don’t need to reiterate how much the media is hurting. You know. You see the shrinking lists of journalists in your databases. You know how much harder it is to land a story now than it was even before the pandemic.

Fluctuations in algorithmically driven third-party traffic sources can have disastrous results on the revenue streams of news outlets. Remember Upworthy? It was taking the media change by storm a decade ago until a Facebook algorithmic change banished it to obscurity, leading to mass layoffs.

Whether this change will be as disastrous is still to be seen. Google has had its own problems with the rollout and was forced to curtail the use of AI summaries after the bot advised customers to put glue on pizza, among other outrageous and wrong responses.

But the state of media today is so precarious, any shift can lead to additional layoffs or even shuttering of outlets.

Continue to watch this story.

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Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.