Other publishers are trying to take more control over their existing content and data, according to News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey, by partnering with third-party licensing vendors such as TollBit, Calliope and Copyright Clearance Center to accurately price their content while giving AI companies access to their data.
“Technology is moving fast, and the news about SGE has made it clear to publishers that they have to move fast or risk disintermediation,” Olivia Joslin, chief operating officer and co-founder at TollBit, told ADWEEK. “They understand the need for a new model where they can charge AI agent traffic.”
TollBit started working with over one-dozen publishers last week alone. Joslin wouldn’t share specifics.
Naturally, Google’s SGE has prompted publishers to make changes to their editorial strategy, diversifying traffic through social media platforms, newsletters and building their subscription models.
While these strategies may provide short-term relief by boosting a slight uptick in social referrals, they pale in comparison to the organic traffic generated from Google Search, according to Marc McCollum, executive vice president of innovation at Raptive.
Independent sites prepare for carnage
As with many platform updates, those most at risk are independent publishers and sites, like Easy Family Recipes and HouseFresh, a blog focused on air quality, which are already working hard for visibility in Google searches.
HouseFresh said it has “virtually disappeared” from search results, noting a 91% decrease in search traffic in recent months, a steep drop from 4,000 daily visitors last October to just 200 as of May 2024.
“For many of the individual content creators, [Google’s update] is going to put them out of business,” said McCollum. “There isn’t a solution that is going to be driven just by behavior changes for the individual creators and publishers. There needs to be an industrywide solution, starting with Google’s remuneration.”
Google, for its part, claims that the AI-infused search will actually benefit publishers.
“We see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query,” Google said in its announcement. “As we expand this experience, we’ll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”