Google's "AI Overview" is costing you half your web traffic. What can you do about it?

It's yet another aspect of AI that has a lot of people upset. This one hits many directly in the pocketbook.

Depending on the business you’re in, your website might be a crucial part of your revenue. Wikipedia would be out of business if people didn’t view its pages, find value, and donate. Amazon would be out of business if people didn’t find what they’re looking for. For many such sites, much of this traffic comes from people typing in what they want on a search engine (meaning, on Google) — and, as you’ve probably observed, search engines now give their own AI-generated answer for most queries.

If you were asking a question to find something out, you will read that AI summary; and studies show that few people are going beyond that and actually clicking on any of the websites. When AI summaries appear, we see an average of 34.5% lower click-through rates.¹²³ 60% of all searches now end with no click to an external website.⁴⁵

Now that fact is that this is very useful for most users. Most people just want a quick answer, and although the more technical or fact-obsessed among us may say the AI summary is often less than wonderful, the fact remains that it’s exactly what most users want. It’s genuinely a great service for them. It might be terrible for the website operators, but hey, tough shit, Netflix was terrible for Blockbuster. Swim or die. Right?

Some search engines, like DuckDuckGo, let you turn the AI summaries off. Well, that’s nice for the web companies, but it reduces the level of service to the user. And we already know from all of human history that expecting people to act against their own self-interest for the common good is comedically fanciful.⁶

So we should not expect these AI summaries to go away.

Now, as you may know, my regular job is as the Exec Director of Skeptoid Media, an educational nonprofit. Skeptoid is supported by private grants and donations. Donors come from the ranks of our weekly Podcast Companion Email subscribers. Those subscribers come almost entirely from popups on our website, episode transcripts at skeptoid.com. And those readers come almost entirely from Google searches.

This means that in all likelihood, Skeptoid is losing 34.5% of new revenue because of AI summaries on search engine results.

As the exec director, it’s kind of my job to be on top of all this. So for the last couple of months, in all my voluminous spare time, I’ve been learning as much about this as I could. Turns out there’s a pretty decent solution — somewhat like the “cure is found alongside the poison,” or whatever that saying is. You can help the search engines provide AI summaries that are more in line with the information on your website, and in thanks, they may even include a link to your page in that AI summary. If you help them, they might be inclined to help you back; and the end user wins in both cases.

In short, there is a bunch of technical stuff, much of which is very new. Here’s all you need to get started: