A research paper published last month provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of how Google’s AI Overview shafts publishers.
Professors Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen tracked over 1,000 participants in the US as they used Google search, either with or without AI Overviews (AIOs) enabled. The results showed that when AIOs appeared — which they did in approximately 41% of searches — outbound organic clicks declined by 39.8%, from 0.62 per search to 0.37.
And despite earlier claims by Google to the contrary, the authors found no evidence that AIOs improved the quality of the traffic that the publishers did receive from organic clicks — bounce rates and time spent on third-party sites showed no difference between the two experiment groups.
Meanwhile, post-experiment surveys indicated that AIOs did not improve the perceived utility of and satisfaction with search among participants, leading the authors to conclude that the summaries ‘divert traffic away from publishers without delivering measurable improvements in user experience’.
The finding that really caught my attention, though, was that AIOs do not appear to reduce the number of clicks on sponsored links in Google search. According to the authors, this suggests that ‘AI-generated summaries primarily replace visits to external websites rather than redistribute attention across the search page.’
It suggests something else, too — that AIOs are going to make search advertising even more lucrative for Google by manufacturing an organic-click famine, which means the company has every incentive to continue full-steam ahead on its present course, even if, as the authors of the paper speculate, it ends up ‘undermin[ing] the economic incentives that sustain high-quality content production’.
After years of unimpeded empire building by tech companies, it’s easy to adopt a fatalistic attitude towards such prognoses. But there may still be a way for all creators — not just large publishers, like the FT and the Guardian — to force Google to share the value that generative AI creates.
The Movement For An Open Web (MOW), which was founded by James Rosewell and Tim Cowen in 2020 to stop Google’s proposed (but now mostly deprecated) Privacy Sandbox solutions, has created the search-only contract (SOC) — a machine-readable file that publishers can add to their platforms for free to protect themselves from having their content plundered.
The strength of the SOC is that it doesn’t rely on complex arguments about IP, and it doesn’t require enforcement by supine regulators. Instead it forms a contract between the AI company and the publisher.
‘If an AI company uses the publishers’ material for non-commercial purposes, or for search indexes, according to Google’s pre-2023 definition of search, it’s fine,’ says Rosewell. ‘If not, it creates a debt. So, it’s not the access that creates a breach of contract, it’s the use of that information.’
Publishers can easily check if LLMs are pilfering their work by asking them what X (publisher) has to say about Y (topic). If the chatbot cites their content, it’s a breach of the SOC, and the publisher can invoice the AI company for £500 (which is the standard fee written into the SOC but can be altered), and then pursue a County Court Judgment for non-payment.
Chris Dicker, CEO of Candr Media, was one of the first to adopt the SOC and he has already sent invoices to the AI companies, says Rosewell, which means that there will likely be court actions in the public domain by September.
Rosewell, who revived his old blog to test the SOC, has also sent invoices to Meta, Google, Microsoft, Grok and OpenAI. And on the afternoon that we spoke with him (1 July), he had just been told that a ‘large UK publisher’ had decided to deploy the SOC.
Even though Dicker has created a programme to automate the process of sending invoices and filing claims, the SOC is not really a practicable, long-term solution in and of itself. Rather, the hope is that, if enough small publishers adopt the contract and make claims, it will create the kind of financial risk that forces AI companies to come to the table.
The best possible outcome from all this, says Rosewell, is that the AI companies come to the MOW and ask to speak to the publishers that have implemented the SOC, to create custom IP-sharing licences for them, paving the way for a fairer content ecosystem.
Because, adds Rosewell, ‘I’m not holding my breath for my 500 quid.’