Is digital news braced for Google's AI overview impact?

Are you a news enthusiast who frequently turns to the internet for updates on India's GST collection, GDP growth rate, or even popular culture topics like "Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives"? If so, you've likely encountered AI-generated overviews before the actual informative articles. 

While AI-powered summaries offer quick information, they significantly impact traditional news publishers, especially the info-based content in the long run for sure.  

Even ChatGPT agrees. When asked 'What will the impact be on digital news publisher's traffic or revenue when Google starts showing AI overview of multiple article sources?', it responds 'Digital news publishers may see a shift in both traffic and revenue patterns. Lower traffic could hurt ad impressions, reducing potential ad revenue for publishers who rely heavily on page views." 

How do AI-generated overviews work? 

“AI Overviews show links to resources that support the information in the snapshot and explore the topic further. This allows people to dig deeper and discover a diverse range of content from publishers, creators, retailers, businesses, and more, and use the information they find to advance their tasks,” this is how Google explains it. 

According to Tapan Sharma of Republic, Google remains unbiased to the publishers and is trying to stay away from showing up the search content via publisher links to avoid being called upon as doing favoritism to publishers as they have been in the past couple of years. 

On the other hand, the Business Head of a leading publication believes today most of the publishers, especially the larger ones, do not get most of their traffic from search but from the discover feature. He doesn’t think any traffic loss has been seen because of Google deploying this generative search. 

“If you search for news, Google will not show you an AI summary because that's not in their plan. Now the challenge is, what you are searching for is, how do you categorize what is news and what is information,” he said. 

He further explained that most mainstream news domains get 50% of their traffic for celebrity news and that is not getting hurt, at least, that hasn't been impacted yet. Now if one searches for ‘Amitabh Bachchan next movie’, they may get an AI overview of the same, because this is more like information than news. But, if one searches for ‘Chiranjeevi ANR National Award’, they will be shown no AI overview but top story links to click on. 

But that too is a fairly large amount of share for the publications like Indian Express, Times of India who specialise in that kind of content; the rest may not get very impacted. 

Sources even say that  Google's VP of News, Shailesh Prakash has told the publishers in the past that there is no plan to deploy generative search on news. 

Impact 

The only severe impact is going to be not on the side of Google, but on the side of the publisher's ecosystem because when a user looks at the top rendition of the search page, he or she does not get a link to click. So whether the publisher was X or Y or Z, they lose the opportunity to be in the rankings on Google search page, as per Sharma. 

He further asserted, “It is going to impact the publishing industry in the long run for sure.” 

Dhawal Gupta opines that Google has been using AI in terms of research for a long, long time. And various answers are now available on Google's website, not just since the more recent AI. I think there is going to be a certain impact on that.  

Subscription models might see growth, though this could favour established publishers with a strong brand. Smaller publishers might face challenges converting casual readers into paying subscribers. 

"Publishers may need to focus on content types that AI overviews can’t replicate well, such as opinion pieces, investigative journalism, and exclusive interviews," said the business head who talked to e4m on condition of anonymity. 

In the past too, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) have set up meetings with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, but the request for fair revenue sharing still has not been concluded. 

The conflict arises from the evolving dynamics of digital media consumption and the government's regulatory framework. Digital news publishers argue for a fair share of the revenue generated from the dissemination of their content on digital platforms, which is often appropriated by tech giants without adequate compensation to the content creators. 

The association had earlier alleged that Google denied publishers a fair share of revenue by parting only a portion of the digital advertising revenue with news websites. 

How are digital publishers bracing up?

Republic, being into various categories of content such as technology, automobile, business, lifestyle, defence, sports, wellness, and health, is trying to create domain authority into multiple different sets of keywords. 

“And we are doing a lot of technical interventions at the CMS level also so that the editorial team also picks up these keywords automatically, which are the high domain authority keywords. We would publish those articles keeping in mind that we need to automatically rank higher and get discovered aggressively in the Google search panels,” added Sharma. 

He believes this is the beginning of an uncertain era of how Google further would maneuver the search results on the Google search panel. But as we chart our way forward, as publishers, we are preparing internally, whether it's enhancing content strategies, editorial strategies, SEO strategies. 

Gupta mentioned, “But good quality publishers need to focus on how they can use this to their advantage by ensuring that they are continuing to bring in highly relevant, highly readable, highly important content.”  

They have to focus on building community to ensure that the content that is being generated not just engages readers once, but is able to reconnect with them at later stages as well.