“Google’s New Search AI will deliver Zero Clicks”

Start gating all premium content. That’s the emergency message one speaker gave to a group of publishers at the 2024 Niche Media Conference.

Kate Hand, EVP of operations fat Gardner Media, signed up for Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) BETA site and said the new experience will decimate most search traffic to publishers, so building first-party data is a top priority.

SGE, Google’s answer to Chat GPT and Bing, is expected to launch this summer. It will push organic news off page one of search results in favor of AI-generated results, virtually eliminating most non-direct search traffic to publishers. 

But not all experts agreed on what to do next.  

Eric Shanfelt, media guru and head of Nearview Media, said that even if 24% of major news sites already block content from Google Gemini, to prevent the current Google AI service from ingesting their content,  “I don’t think you should right now.” 

In a session titled, “Google: Friend or Foe,” Shanfelt  noted that Google Gemini’s media attribution is better than chat GPT and that “if you eliminate yourself from the game, you are out of the game.” 

When one publisher asked, “How can they scrape data from my website?” Shanfelt answered, “Dude, I’m not a lawyer, but they’ve been scraping it for decades.” 

Ingesting new content with a copyright is only the beginning of a larger problem. The search position of publishers on Google may be much worse.

Friend or foe?

Initially, Google made an informal deal with publishers. It would ingest their content in return for delivering more traffic.

Then it started selling ads. 

Hand noted when Google moved search advertising to the top of results in 2011, every ad Google sold pushed organic results ever lower on the page. 

By 2023, only 2% of users clicked past the first page of results 2023, and 68% of Google users never clicked, simply finding the answers to Googled questions without visiting the website that provided the content. 

When Google’s SGE launches—speculators guess sometime between May and July—it will deliver AI-generated results for 86% of searches, pushing organic content down by a page and a half, virtually out of sight and out of mind. 

So far Google and other AI providers have shown ravenous appetites for content, a willingness to skirt as yet unsettled copyright law, and a reluctance to provide clicks that compete with their models. 

Google removed “Don’t be evil” from its company code of conduct in 2018. “Coincidence?” Hand asked.

Hand, who has subscribed to the SGE  BETA feed, said it now generates results for 86% of all queries. That means 86% of all search results for organic content will be pushed to page 2 or 3, where they will only receive 2% of the traffic. 

“From what I’ve seen, there will be zero clicks and zero benefits to publishers,” she said. 

Zero clicks and zero benefits to publishers? But wait, there’s more…

While Google’s AI technology on the Beta site is not great—she likened it to an out-dated business model flailing to keep up with GPT—it also has a separate algorithm from Google search. 

One publisher asked, “Does that mean that all our work on SEO will no longer be relevant?”

Hand answered that no one knows, but she does not plan to chase Google’s new AI algorithms. “I’m not going try to game the system this time.” 

Instead, she noted there may be a  “silver lining in the mushroom cloud.”  Yup, there was a slide on that with a brilliant edging around a mushroom cloud, God bless her, along with an anecdote comparing AI to her drunken doppelgänger, similar to a real-life one that danced on a bar during a conference. She is a fan of her staff leveraging AI  for their own purposes.

She also recommends that publishers start talking to advertisers about Google’s weaknesses. Google “is not designed for discovery,” she pointed out. So the “you don’t know what you don’t know” kinds of information that niche publishers excel at is still in play.

She also told publishers to be confident that “Your audience is a better investment than Google ads,” which only deliver the narrow audience at the bottom of the funnel.  “The good news is that commodity content is replaceable.”  Niche content is not. “Google is terrible at niche.”

While theoretically, AI could eventually generate content off of its own AI content, in reality, the process tends to degenerate the content over time, “like a photocopy of a photocopy.”   

“Google admits adjusting their auctions to meet their revenue goals without telling advertisers.” 

Gate your content

So yes, do leverage AI to your benefit for content creation, but gate all premium content – anything beyond press releases – to at least capture the audience data. 

She said Gardner already had gated their most popular content at the most robust publications, asking visitors to trade a simple registration to view “the rest of an article”  and adding premium paid content into the funnel.

The results so far have been excellent – about a 12% conversion, and 19.42% paid for a subscription. 

“Collect and protect your first-party data,” she said.

“The new audience game is about quality over quantity.”