[Written By External Partner]
Over the past few years, we have been told repeatedly that AI will transform the web economy. A typical example is shopping and checkout with ChatGPT, i.e., the process of searching for and purchasing stuff all contained within the ChatGPT app. The hotel website, Booking.com, for example, can now be accessed fully within ChatGPT, allowing you to book a hotel without technically visiting Booking.com.
Of course, if you’ve booked a hotel via ChatGPT, you’re still in the minority. The agentic web, where AI agents will perform tasks, is still in its infancy, and most of us would have a lot of skepticism about trusting a bot that can struggle to tell us how many ‘Rs’ are in a strawberry with booking, say, an important flight. In short, the transformation of the web economy is not yet fully fledged.
AI summaries are changing the game
Yet, one area where we are seeing a rapid transformation is with AI summaries/overviews and zero-click search. Basically, that’s what you will find now at the top of a Google Search: a blurb answering your question and providing a bit more detail. The fact that such information is there has been called a potential “extinction event” for some website owners. If the answer is there in the search results, you are much less likely to visit the website that provided it.
Google argues that its AI summaries from Gemini also provide links to sources, prompting you to visit websites to learn more. Yet, it depends on the query. If your search was “who won the NBA Championship in 1996?”, a cursory glance at the AI summary might suffice. If it is something like “show me the NBA lines for today’s games,” you might follow through to the sportsbook to place your bet.
As such, websites with specific content will likely suffer. Websites like TechWeLike will have more in-depth analysis and information that cannot be summarized in a text box, but consider websites like recipe blogs. Those are widely cited as the ones in danger. Anything with a “how-to” aspect could face problems, as do websites that deal with easily regurgitated datasets, like sports reference websites.
None of this should be immediately surprising. Website owners have been pointing out the threat for a few years now, ever since ChatGPT launched. But as Google in particular rolls out more and more new AI features for Gemini within Search, the alarm bells are starting to ring ever louder. Fewer clicks, less ad revenue, and for the consumer, a smaller concentration of sources in discovery.
A change in tactics
So, what are the remedies? Several have been mooted, not least the supplantation of SEO (search engine optimization, the practice of optimizing content with keywords for search engines) by GEO (generative engine optimization for AI). Google has recently said it would provide more links in its AI summaries, helping more websites get discovered. Yet, there are still challenges, especially for the little guy.
One of the more interesting solutions has been proposed and implemented by Cloudflare, which is rolling out a “pay-per-scrape” platform that will charge AI web crawlers each time they access a website’s data. Cloudflare has been at the forefront of addressing the blight of AI web crawlers scraping data without permission, offering website owners tools to block them if desired. The carrot approach of its marketplace might be more effective than the stick of blocking bots.
If you believe all of this does not matter or it’s simply a case of survival of the fittest, consider that content creation is based on incentives. If you run a vegan recipe blog that is no longer getting clicks because people are simply asking ChatGPT for those recipes, why would you keep adding content? The same rule applies to all fields, from technology how-tos to sports game analysis to medical advice. Right now, it’s a huge challenge for website owners and content creators, and it arguably isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
