Google's New ChatGPT-Style Search Could Kill The Websites That Feed It

Why Google's New ChatGPT-Style Search Could Kill The Websites That Feed It

Google just previewed its chatbot-style vision for the future of web search results. But if it mines publications' hard work without compensating them, many may not survive this shift.

By Emily Dreibelbis
PC Magazine
May 13, 2023

https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/why-googles-new-chatgpt-style-search-could-kill-the-websites-that-feed

The typical PCMag product reviewer's home is a web of wires and blinking LEDs from laptops, smartwatches, and scores of other gadgets. Analysts spend weeks performing hands-on testing to produce in-depth buying guides that help readers get the most from technology.

But what if that wealth of content is reduced to grist for a bigger mill? Google's new AI search experience pushes links to articles below the digital fold, summarizing the response to a search query up top as a conversational, ChatGPT-style paragraph. Content in the answer, a mini-article in itself, can theoretically come from PCMag and a host of other publications.

To start, this AI experience will only apply to searches for which Google algorithms can produce helpful results, The Verge reports. But it's unclear how many searches that will cover, and whether Google will compensate or cite its sources. The company has said only that it's "committed to continue sending valuable traffic to sites across the web."

Writers watching a live demo of the new experience at Google's I/O conference found it chilling. “Did Google receive that e-bike and set it up?" asks Angela Moscaritolo, PCMag's health and fitness expert. She reviewed the Aventon Aventure Ebike, which the demo suggested for commuters as "good for hill climbing."

"Did it take it on the beach and all over town to determine if it's actually good for hill climbing? If you didn’t verify the claim your AI is presenting, then you need to cite that source," she says.

With what we've seen from Google thus far, users can't truly know if the information came from a PCMag article, customer reviews, marketing claims on a manufacturer's product page -- or some undistinguished mish-mosh of all that. The even more chilling thing for society as a whole? If Google goes down this path, that source material could end up less likely to be from trusted publications and sources, because the revenue hit they take means they may not be around.

'Move Fast and Break Things' Gets Old

Are we being alarmist? Well, it's not the first time Silicon Valley has given media companies the runaround. Journalists of a certain age will remember the shift from print to digital media, as consumers embraced the easy-to-access, often-free information on the internet.

"Sites like Craigslist played a huge role, since people no longer paid for [classified] listings in what was previously a huge section of the newspaper," says Sascha Segan, PCMag's former lead mobile reviewer, who worked on several early news sites in the 1990s, including stints helping The Washington Post and The Guardian transition to the web.

PCMag has had a presence on the web since 1995, so it had time to prepare for the demise of the PC Magazine print edition in 2009 and the shift to an all-digital operation. And while we have brand recognition that brings loyal readers directly to our site on a consistent basis, many more find our content through Google search queries. We're not alone; consumer tech publications on the web routinely jockey for position in search results using various search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that aim to bring readers to the site, drive clicks, and thus revenue.

As one Wall Street Journal reporter asked on Twitter after the live demo at Google I/O this week: "Is every media org's SEO team panicking [right now]?"

Tech companies have rolled out various news-related products over the years -- from Facebook Instant Articles to Google AMP -- ostensibly to assist the news business. As The Verge notes, AMP was intended to seve up mobile web pages that loaded faster and cleaner. The problem? AMP pages generated less money for publications than a standard article, sometimes just 60%, and Google certainly wasn't going to cut a check to make up the difference.

Then there's the classic "pivot to video." Facebook went all in on video years ago, and convinced publications that people were spending way more time watching clips than they actually were. By the time the truth came out, however, many publications had laid off writers and bulked up video teams. Mark Zuckerberg may be able to "move fast and break things," but it's not as easy for the increasingly cash-strapped media business to react in response.

AI Kills the News, Replaces It With Algorithms

For a certain portion of information on the web, an AI-generated summary at the top of a Google search query will leave the public with two options.

One is to spend time reading the AI snippet rather than the source, making Google and its AI implementations the arbiter of information, without recompense to the creators who indirectly provided it. The other? Scroll past the AI results and use the remaining time to click on articles from the largest, most SEO-optimized sites.

"Google has been juggling between whether it's dependent on journalism, or whether it wants to usurp it, for years," says Segan. "It seems to keep wanting to grow into...the canonical, one-stop source for information. But as it does that, it risks destroying all of the information sources it uses."

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