Publishers Demand 'AI Overview' Traffic Stats from Google, Alleging 'Forced' Deals

AI Overviews have lowered click-through traffic to Daily Mail sites by as much as 89%, the publisher told a UK government body that regulates competition. So they've joined other top news organizations (including Guardian Media Group and the magazine trade body the Periodical Publishers Association) in asking the regulators 'to make Google more transparent and provide traffic statistics from AI Overview and AI Mode to publishers,' reports the Guardian:

Publishers — already under financial pressure from soaring costs, falling advertising revenues, the decline of print and the wider trend of readers turning away from news — argue that they are effectively being forced by Google to either accept deals, including on how content is used in AI Overview and AI Mode, or 'drop out of all search results', according to several sources... In recent years, Google Discover, which feeds users articles and videos tailored to them based on their past online activity, has replaced search as the main source of click-throughs to content. However, David Buttle, founder of the consultancy DJB Strategies, says the service, which is also tied to publishers' overall search deals, does not deliver the quality traffic that most publishers need to drive their long-term strategies. 'Google Discover is of zero product importance to Google at all,' he says. 'It allows Google to funnel more traffic to publishers as traffic from search declines... Publishers have no choice but to agree or lose their organic search. It also tends to reward clickbaity type content. It pulls in the opposite direction to the kind of relationship publishers want.'

Meanwhile, publishers are fighting a wider battle with AI companies seeking to plunder their content to train their large language models. The creative industry is intensively lobbying the government to ensure that proposed legislation does not allow AI firms to use copyright-protected work without permission, a move that would stop the 'value being scraped' out of the £125bn sector. Some publishers have struck bilateral licensing deals with AI companies — such as the FT, the German media group Axel Springer, the Guardian and the Nordic publisher Schibsted with the ChatGPT maker OpenAI — while others such as the BBC have taken action against AI companies alleging copyright theft. 'It is a two-pronged attack on publishers, a sort of pincer movement,' says Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media senior executive who now runs a media consultancy, Seedelta. 'Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, while AI summaries are being integrated into products so there is no need to click through, effectively taking money from both ends. It is an existential crisis.'

'At the moment the AI and tech community are showing no signs of supporting publisher revenue,' says the chief executive of the UK's Periodical Publishers Association...

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