AI poses new challenges for website operators

The potential of AI and search engines is immense and will transform entire industries. It offers new opportunities, but also massive challenges, depending on how big platforms like Google and Microsoft decide.

It has been a trend for years that large platforms such as Facebook, Google and Tiktok try to keep users on their sites as long as possible. To do this, they present content from other websites in their offer without paying for it. The integration of AI chatbots like ChatGPT into Bing and Google has the potential to increase this trend and has drastic implications.

How websites make money

Creating online content costs money. This is true not only for publishers, but also for websites offering cooking recipes, soccer statistics, news and technical articles, and so on. Most websites make money through advertising and paying users. They need traffic to their website to generate revenue. But Google is constantly changing its search results in the direction that fewer and fewer clicks on sources or related pages are needed. This improves the search experience for the user, but websites receive less traffic as a result and therefore less advertising revenue.

An exemplary example

From Google search, when asked where to find ChatGPT:

Congratulations to technikr for the good Google ranking, however, all relevant information is
is already displayed in the search result and the complete question is answered in the stippet. You don't even have to click on them website: no users on the page, no ad revenue, article written for free.

If it is no longer necessary for users to click on search results in search engines or to have sources displayed, copyright holders will be disadvantaged in the publication of their content.

Microsoft's new Bing search, which uses an AI like ChatGPT, demonstrates this trend. In response to the question:
"I'm planning a trip for our anniversary in September. What are the destinations within a 4-hour flight?", Bing displays traditional search results on the left and the AI answer on the right:

The sources for each destination are linked. With the answer, the user could at least look into the destinations in more detail by clicking on the links. The footnotes summarize all source information and thus the info and source can be quickly verified.

The desktop view is deceptive. Most people are on the Internet with their smartphones. And there, search results and chatbot answers are not on equal footing as they are in the desktop version. The AI answer is present and the regular search results are further down.

In the end, however, the real problem is in the chatbot. If you click on the questions below, it opens and you will most likely get the complete information by simply asking the chatbot. Great for the user, because he could even do this in the car by voice input. However, there is no awareness of websites that should be visited regularly. You simply stay in the search engine and chat with the bot. However, websites are dependent on convincing users of their value in the long term in order to monetize their offer.

What do search engines like Microsoft Bing or Google get out of it ? Quite simply: advertising is placed on Bing and the advertising revenues are thus deducted from the originators and shifted to the search engine. As a company, you might even be able to buy recommendations through the chatbot.

No clicks, no readers, no revenue

Microsoft has no plans to compensate the creators of the content that the AI refers to in its answers.
The sources have been cited and that's enough. And it won't be any different for Google as has already been made clear with the snippet example above.

If clicks via search decrease massively because all questions are answered directly by the chatbot, websites can no longer monetize their content they do not build users which support the website in any way. As a result, they can only produce cheap content or no content at all. The AI, in turn, would have only poor sources available, the quality of the answers drops and in the end the whole internet is broken.

Higher quality content required

There are already websites that are more independent of Google and have their own readership that either generates advertising revenue or pays for content. However, these sites could be faced with the decision of whether or not to make their premium content available to AI search and risk no longer being mentioned as a relevant source in the responses. Higher quality websites would perhaps be less affected by AI search. AI-powered search could help the sites that best serve the search intent. Comprehensive blog posts might perform better.

Finally, more competition

When was the last time website owners actually optimized a website for Bing ? Probably not at all!
Together with the competition from social media, which also serve as search engines, the balance of power could shift in a currently very one-sided market. The truth is that search engine optimization is currently called optimization for Google.

New ideas needed

It is important that we become aware of how the use of AI content shifts users' attention, time and money from content creators to AI platforms for exploitation.

Therefore, new ideas and strategies are needed to ensure that content creators can also benefit from the AI revolution and the platforms' growing profits. If we continue down the current path, we could have a serious problem on the Internet in the long run. So we need to renegotiate what content is worth to us and ensure that creators are rewarded appropriately.