In a recent post, I lamented that my posts were being gathered up by AI services and I was losing the opportunity to have my thinking identified with my content. The best example I could think of was the way Google search now included an AI summary in response to queries and it seemed to me that the position of this summary before the more traditional links would reduce attention to these links. It even seemed to me that this action on Google’s part might be beneficial to Google in the short run, but not in the long run. What I speculated was that by diverting users from possible attention to the content associated with links would reduce the incentives of content creators who might discontinue their efforts or place their content behind a paywall reducing what was available to users and to Google.
What I mean by incentives could involve the funds popular bloggers receive, but there is also perceived value in the attention one receives and the sense that the content creator has offered something of personal value to others.
The PEW Research on the Inclusion of an AI Summary in Search Results
The PEW Research Center has recently conducted a study as part of its Internet & Technology initiative. The impact of AI has become a topic they study and the researchers decided to ask a question very much related to the issue I raised. Researchers gained permission to collect data from 900 volunteers as the participants made use of Google search. The researchers were interested in the differences between behavior when search results contained or did not contain AI-generated search summaries. Were there differences in the likelihood the user visited a link that appeared in what might be described as the traditional list of links? Given that the AI-summary also listed some relevant links at the end of the summary, did those who opened the full summary make use of these links?
The PEW researchers found data very much substantiating what I had anticipated.
The analysis found that Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one, with users who encountered an AI summary clicking on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits, compared to 15% of visits for those who did not encounter an AI summary.
The study also discovered that Google users who encountered an AI summary rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself, which occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary, and that users who encountered an AI summary were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary.
The researchers made one interesting observation about the basis the AI-summary claimed as a source. The most common link was to Wikipedia. I would be tempted to describe this observation as demonstrating that Google Search provides a secondary summary of a secondary source.
In my searching on this issue, I found that news services that have made their content accessible to search have reached a similar conclusion regarding search summaries. These organizations were already under pressure from online search and had hoped, I assume, that links would bring greater attention to their content both openly available and behind a paywall.