If You're Reading This, You're Probably an AI Bot
"Fnord666" writes:
If You're Reading This, You're Probably an AI Bot:
[...] As the New York Times points out in a fresh report, Google results are directing more and more people to...Google, and that's it. Generally, there's an AI Overview at the top of a results page for any given informational search, and perhaps that's enough for many queries. But a study from Growth Memo referenced by the Times says 75% of people who find themselves using AI Mode, stay in AI mode rather than switching to the web. And if you're in AI Mode, that means you're just hanging out chatting with the bot while Google's AI agents flit around trying to answer your question.
But the point is that whether users tend to stop at the AI Overview, or engage with it and end up in AI Mode, "more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human," a Cloudflare report from earlier this month says. As less and less human traffic comes from Google Search, and more and more ads are being shown to bots, the danger is that the business model of a free and open web will become unsustainable.
After all, a study from earlier this year found that over 35% of new websites were AI generated . It turns out they're also, apparently, more than 50% AI-consumed.
Google, for its part, claimed about a year ago in a blog post that search traffic is still strong actually, and that claims otherwise are "often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search." A representative reached by the Times also pointed out that there are new features in the Google Search's AI Mode that show relevant web results, apparently in an effort to push users back to the web.
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