Google's Gen AI Search Threatens Publishers With $2B Annual Ad Revenue Loss

Google launched its artificial intelligence-powered search engine, Search Generative Experience, in beta last May, sending publishers scrambling to prepare for a significant disruption in organic search traffic, with potential declines ranging from 20% to 60%, according to media executives and search engine optimization experts interviewed for this story.

A decrease in search traffic for publishers on the open web often translates to a decline in digital ad revenue. Marc McCollum, executive vice president of innovation at Raptive, estimates that with the current SGE, ad revenue loss could amount to as much as $2 billion annually across the publishing industry.

Raptive—which runs ad sales for titles like Half Baked Harvest, MacRumors and Stereogum—gets a significant percentage of its organic traffic from Google Search, according to McCollum. The company didn’t share specifics.

“When fully rolled out, SGE could result in a 25% decline in search traffic across its 5,000-publisher network,” McCollum said. Travel and family verticals saw the least favorable results, with a 29% loss in traffic, while the food vertical saw a 20% loss.

Meanwhile, other publishers expect a material decline in search traffic of over 60%, one publishing executive, who wished to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, told ADWEEK.

In response, publishers are preparing to combat the predicted SGE traffic impact, including retooling their SEO strategies, investing in content expertise and diversifying traffic.

“Advertising is still the largest revenue generator for Google, across Google properties and YouTube, and we can expect that they will continue to design SGE to maximize this revenue,” said Gartner vp analyst Nicole Greene. “Publishers need to rethink the structure of their companies, often focused on large investments and growth, and look to embrace the changes in technology and consumer engagement by diversifying revenue streams beyond advertising to areas like paid models and events. This helps bring content to consumers where they are more likely to engage.”

SGE is accessible to people in over 120 countries, including U.S., India, and Japan, where Google’s crawlers pull in content from across the internet and provide fact-driven opinions. However, not all keywords have a SGE response. Studying 23 websites in the technology industry last September, Search Engine Land reported an aggregate organic traffic drop of between 18% and 64%. A total of 1,242 high-impact keywords were identified across all 23 websites, of which 8% did not have an SGE.

Raptive conducted its first analysis last September, with a subsequent one in February, by comparing Google’s current search experience with SGE for its top 1,000 keywords that drive traffic to its network of websites. While some keywords yield no SGE results, some SGE responses include links to Raptive websites. Conversely, for other keywords, no links to Raptive websites were included in the SGE results. With an internal program that calculates expected click-through rates, Raptive arrived at an expected average traffic loss.

“It’s premature to estimate the traffic impact of our SGE experiment as we continue to rapidly evolve the user experience and design, including how links are displayed,” a Google spokesperson told ADWEEK. “We’ll continue to prioritize approaches that send valuable traffic to publishers and are showing more links to sites with SGE in search than before, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered.” 

However, Raptive does not consider SGE results displayed above or instead of the traditional organic link as “new opportunities for content to be discovered,” said McCollum.

Diversifying traffic and content expertise

Publishers are increasingly looking into managing their intellectual property, either by legally defending or monetizing their content, said Steven Read, adMarketplace’s chief product officer.

A growing number of publishers, such as The Associated Press, have arranged licensing deals with OpenAI for its data in exchange for compensation. Meanwhile, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over AI use of copyrighted content.   

“Other publishers are also exploring options to sell [their] content via deals to OpenAI or other large language models,” Read said.

Elsewhere, publishers are taking a pragmatic approach to their editorial strategy, diversifying traffic from newsletters and subscriptions and, in some cases, investing in their own generative AI chatbots to attract traffic.

Money.com gets 40% of its traffic from Google Search, according to CEO Greg Powel, a former Google employee. The publisher is reworking its website format by including snippets of content deployed in a question-and-answer format, answering people’s questions related to a product or service, ultimately, to increase traffic from SGE.

“The idea is that Google would crawl and incorporate that into SGE potentially,” said Powel.

Meanwhile, publishers with less editorial flexibility are exploring paid search and social ads to grab traffic, said McCollum.

Publisher clients at Collective Measures are gearing up for mid-funnel SGE queries, which include comparison questions for products and services. They aim to rank for questions that SGE has not yet answered, as traffic for top-level queries is expected to shrink.

“It’s important to try to get into the SGE result, as well as to rank for those things that SGE isn’t showing,” said Katie Tweedy, associate director of SEO and content marketing at Collective Measures.

Ultimately, it’s all contingent on people’s behavior. In the SGE environment, ads are displayed toward the bottom of the AI-generated response, unlike the current experience, where sponsored ads typically appear at the top.

“Potentially, people won’t click on ads as much, and that cannibalizes revenue for Google in a big way,” said Powel. “If Google makes a lot less money when they show SGE, I will hypothesize that they might not show [SGE] for that query.”