Google’s Defense of AI Search

A blog post by VP, Head of Google Search, Liz Reid illustrates persuasive strategies and data interpretation to deny the negative impact of AI search features on website traffic.

Although reports find that Google AI search summaries reduce clicks to news and other sites, the company argues that is not the case. In a blog post, “AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks,” Reid writes, “user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others.” A TechCrunch writer describes the rhetoric well:

That word “some” is doing heavy lifting here, as Google doesn’t share data about how many sites are gaining or losing. And while chatbots like ChatGPT have certainly seen traffic increase in recent months, that doesn’t mean online publishers aren’t suffering.

In business communication, we encourage students to find more precise words than “some” and “very.” Here we see Google hiding between vague references—and aggregate data to mask the impact on publishers. Reid also wrote, “overall traffic to sites is relatively stable.“

Google argues that click “quality” is improving, meaning people are more purposeful, engaging longer on sites they choose for a reason instead of responding to clickbait. That may be, but organic searches (from unpaid sources) is down for “some” news outlets already hurting because of declining print and digital subscriptions.

In other words, if you get your question answered from the AI summary, why go to the original source? The next question seems to be, what, if any, responsibility does Google carry for this impact?