What happens to the internet if no one clicks search links?

0:00Helen Havlak:A big part of the economy of the internet is built around this sound, the click, or okay, sometimes the smartphone screen tap. It's the action that gets you from a search page or a social media feed to a website where you're shown ads. But that click could be under threat because of a new feature Google rolled out last year called AI Overviews. It uses artificial intelligence to deliver an answer to your question before you click any links. This is bad news for the companies that produce the information that goes into those answers. I totally understand the temptation. Why click on a bunch of sources if you can just get a summary?

0:38Helen Havlak:Claudia Jaswinska is a journalist and researcher at Columbia University. She focuses on the ways AI is upending the news industry. And she says news outlets don't have many options. Publishers are kind of in a bind because if you want to opt out of AI overviews, you opt out of Google search entirely. Yes, the AI summaries may be costing them visits, but without Google, they would be in even worse shape. Helen Havlack is the publisher of the tech news site The Verge. She says traffic to her site has been falling and the decline lines up clearly with the rise of Google's AI overviews. Extinction level event is already here and a bunch of small publishers have already gone out of business.

1:19Helen Havlak:Consider this. AI is coming for clicks, and the businesses that depend on those clicks are scrambling to survive. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

1:40Helen Havlak:It's Consider This from NPR. So what do you do when the revenue stream that your company has depended on, clicks, is suddenly looking shakier? NPR's John Riewich has been looking at how some businesses are adapting to the rise of AI chatbots and their effect on search engines like Google. And before we go on, we'll note that Google is a financial supporter of NPR, but we cover them like any other company. Here's John.

2:04John Ruwitch:Nate Hake's career path took an adventurous turn nine years ago.

2:08Helen Havlak:I left my corporate legal job in 2016. I thought I was just going to take a sabbatical year to travel the world.

2:15John Ruwitch:On the road, he started blogging. One thing led to another, and now he runs a travel site called Travel Lemming.

2:21Helen Havlak:I live in hotels, quite literally.

2:24John Ruwitch:Hague's company posts advice and reviews, like this video he made.

2:27Helen Havlak:Hey guys, so I'm coming at you from Ushkoli, which is the highest continuously occupied settlement in Europe, and really just like my favorite part of Georgia.

2:37John Ruwitch:Like countless other sites, Travel Lemming has been able to stay in business because of an unwritten grand bargain that's underpinned the way the internet works.

2:45Helen Havlak:Google crawls websites and then they provide search results.

2:49John Ruwitch:Traditionally, that's been a list of links. Those links get clicks. Websites get visitors. And for many publishers, like Travel Lemming, they make money off ads and referrals to products and services.

3:00Helen Havlak:Making a travel blog is a volume game. You need a lot of readers in order for it to be economically viable because you're only making a penny or two per visitor.

3:10John Ruwitch:Most AI chatbots work differently. They put answers front and center rather than links. Google's search still produces web links, but it now offers AI-produced answers at the top of some queries.

3:22Helen Havlak:So they're no longer a search engine, they're an answer engine. And what that's had the effect of doing is just dramatically reducing clicks.

3:28John Ruwitch:Haig says he thinks Google also changed its search algorithm around the time it started to focus heavily on AI in late 2023, and he thinks that contributed to the collapse of his traffic. In a statement to NPR, Google said website traffic can fluctuate for many reasons, It said those algorithm updates were separate from the launch of AI search features. Google said it prioritizes sending traffic to the web, and it wants AI search experiences to lead to clicks. Publishers say the threat from AI is real, though. Some have accused AI companies of copyright infringement by consuming content without licenses and providing answers based on work that others did.

4:05John Ruwitch:Companies are scrambling to come up with solutions. One of them is Cloudflare, a major player in web security. Matthew Prince is its CEO.

4:14Helen Havlak:If we are going to have an increasingly AI-driven web, which I think is inevitable, the business model of the web needs to change, and content creators need to get compensated in a different way.

4:24John Ruwitch:Cloudflare's approach, unveiled in July, is called pay-per-crawl. Customers can now toggle an online switch so that when an AI bot tries to visit their website to get information, it blocks them if they don't pay a fee. Prince says it's a first step in addressing a huge problem.

4:40Helen Havlak:If content creators can't get compensated for their content, they'll stop creating content. And I think we all will suffer as a result of that.

4:48John Ruwitch:Others are running the other direction, straight into AI's arms. Chris Andrew is CEO and co-founder of Scrunch AI. Scrunch tries to help customers' websites get noticed by AI bots so that their name or products appear in AI answers.

5:03Helen Havlak:We're seeing companies that are desperate to get their content consumed by AI models.

5:08John Ruwitch:He's talking about companies that sell products and services, like sneakers or oil changes. Andrew says that visibility can lead to more transactions, even if there are fewer overall clicks. He sees a future where a whole new post-human web emerges to feed AI. The websites of today, full of pictures and videos, were designed primarily for eyeballs.

5:30Helen Havlak:So I have a thesis that we're going to move to a non-visual internet, because the internet is going to be for AI.

5:35John Ruwitch:And AI wants words.

5:37Helen Havlak:The secret is in the name. Large language models want language. And as a society, we have built a very confusing, over-designed, over-incentivized internet that is heavily interactive.

5:51John Ruwitch:Websites as we know them won't vanish altogether, he says. People will still need to visit them to buy stuff. And that's where Nate Haig thinks there might be a future for Traveleming. His company recently launched a Paris itinerary planning service, and they're branching out to other destinations soon.

6:07Helen Havlak:And it may be that we're not even really an information source in five years. It may be that we're more of a tour company.

6:13John Ruwitch:Tours, after all, are in person, he says. And AI can't replace that.

6:20Helen Havlak:That was NPR's John Rewich. And you heard reporting at the top of this episode from NPR's Bobby Allen. This episode was produced by Connor Donovan and Henry Larson with audio engineering by Patrick Murray. It was edited by Ashley Brown, Brett Neely, Cara Platoni, and Nadia Lancey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

6:43Helen Havlak:It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.