Two major publishers, Dotdash Meredith and Ziff Davis, say Google AI Overviews have had no significant impact on their traffic.
The IAC (owner of Dotash) wrote the following in its Q2 2024 shareholder letter:
“Google started rolling out AI Overviews in mid-May, and the impact on our traffic has been negligible. Referrals from Google searches generate less than half of our traffic, and our analysis shows that about 15% of searches in our categories return AI-generated answers, with this being most common in the health, technology, and finance categories. The differences in click-through rate between pages with and without AI Overviews are small so far, but it’s early days and products change quickly, so the past is not prologue.”
IAC letter
And here’s what Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah said on the company’s quarterly earnings call:
“We analyzed thousands of searches across our most important domains, which generate the lion’s share of our organic search referrals, and the percentage of times an AI summary was displayed. That percentage dropped to 8%, meaning that 92% of the time the search engine results page did not include an AI summary for the queries that matter most to us. Analysis by other industry experts shows a similar percentage of total searches leading to AI summaries… “At this point, we do not see this as a material change to the search experience.”
ZD earnings call
You do not need to be logged in. Another development is that Google AI Overviews are now visible to all users in the US, even if they are not signed in to their Google account. Google has confirmed that AI Overviews are available to signed out users in the US.
Google is also expanding access to AI Overviews to the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil, while also expanding experimentation capabilities and access to Search Labs AI Overview.
Links and quotes. Google also introduced a new right-hand side link indicator for AI Summaries on desktop. A mobile version of this can be accessed by tapping the site icons in the top right of mobile search results. Additionally, Google will test “adding links to relevant web pages directly in the text of AI Summaries,” the company announced. This is in addition to the links Google already shows in AI Summaries with these AI Summaries link cards. Google said this makes it “even easier for people to click out and visit sites they’re interested in.”
Why we care. Generative AI has only just begun to reshape search, and AI will continue to do so over the next decade. AI overviews (and before that, Search Generative Experience) have generated a lot of fear among SEOs, publishers, and content creators, so it’s helpful to get some insight into how publishers are being affected in these early days.
Additional reporting by Barry Schwartz.
