The news: Google is experimenting with AI summaries in Discover—the news feed within its iOS and Android search apps—adding yet another threat to referral traffic for web publishers.
- Instead of displaying a headline and link to a news story, Discover shows an AI summary with an icon featuring the logo of any cited source.
- The AI summaries feature is currently being tested in the US, per TechCrunch.
Getting to the point: News publishers are also experimenting with AI summaries on their own websites. These can enhance search engine optimization (SEO) and be reader-friendly for headline skimmers.
- Yahoo News, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and others are including bulleted takeaways in their content, making articles easier to digest.
- Those summaries could make content more compatible with chatbot consumption and increase the likelihood of appearing in AI outputs.
The risks: Until now, the Discover page has been a space for Google users to find news stories untouched by AI Overviews—and where web publishers could count on referral traffic.
The presence of an AI Overview in Google search results is linked to a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR), per Ahrefs, meaning Discover users could be less likely to visit full articles.
Reliability can be rocky: Skipping the full source material could become problematic if the AI has inaccuracies. Google’s search app contains a disclaimer noting that these summaries are generated with AI, “which can make mistakes.”
That’s not just a hypothetical: Google and Apple have both faced backlash over inaccurate or bizarre summaries and alerts.
- When AI Overviews launched, users noted strange and sometimes dangerous answers, such as recommendations to eat rocks daily and put glue on pizza, or claims that astronauts met cats on the moon.
- In January, Apple paused Apple Intelligence notification summaries for news and entertainment apps due to inaccurate alerts.
Our take: If users increasingly rely on AI summaries—and if Discover becomes a zero-click search hub—publishers risk further declines in web traffic, imperiling not just ad revenues but the viability of good journalism.
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