Cloudflare has revealed how Google AI is resulting in large drops in human traffic on the internet.
In a new report, Cloudflare confirmed that more than 50 per cent of internet traffic is now non-human. In particular, the report examines how Google’s search engine accounts for approximately 88 per cent of referral traffic. This means that the company’s Gemini-powered AI Overview feature is scraping websites and regurgitating their content directly on Google.
While Search does include tiny links to sourced pages beside each AI Overview, this has nonetheless resulted in many people not clicking through. In less than a year, Cloudflare found that Google Search’s AI Overviews have led to a human traffic decline of almost 40 per cent in less than a year. As a result, this has led many publishers to prepare for “Google Zero,” which Cloudflare describes as a world in which “little to no traffic comes from search referrals.”
Compounding this issue, Cloudflare notes, is the fact that Google uses a single web crawler — an automated tool to browse the internet — to both index sites and train AI models. What this means is that publishers who opt out of appearing in Google AI Overview will also be unable to be indexed in Search. Google has started to change this in the UK to comply with regional regulations, but it remains to be seen if and when they will expand internationally.
Either way, there are obviously other issues beyond hurting website traffic. In particular, it’s been well-documented that AI regularly suffers “hallucinations” in which they share misinformation, and that is no less true for AI Overviews. For instance, a recent study conducted for The New York Times found that AI Overviews are correct about nine out of ten times. While that sounds like a high success rate, the sheer volume of Google searches — roughly five trillion per year — means that tens of millions incorrect answers are being generated every hour. We’ve also seen instances of Google censoring searches related to topics like Donald Trump’s mental state and ICE detention centre reviews.
All of this is to say — it’s worth taking the time to actually click through (legitimate) websites both to support them and properly vet that the information Google claims it’s citing from them is valid.
Image credit: Google
Source: Cloudflare Via: Kotaku
