from Hacker News

Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

by jaredwiener on 6/10/25, 9:03 PM with 236 comments

  • by JKCalhoun on 6/10/25, 9:25 PM

  • by MyPasswordSucks on 6/11/25, 12:51 AM

    In the old days - back before smartphones, back before widescreen monitors, back before broadband - the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on. If one were to visualize the concept, they might well say that this formed a "web" of sorts.

    The big publishers were the first to really reject the "Links" page. If it's not a link to our content, or the content of our sister publications, then why should we include it? Instead, they threw their resources into optimizing their placement on search engines. This took the "web" and turned it closer towards a hub-and-spoke system, as smaller sites withered and died.

    Now, people have found a way to retrieve various pieces of information they're looking for that doesn't involve a search engine. It may not be perfect (gluey pizza, anyone?) but objectively, it's certainly more efficient than a list of places that have used the same words that a person is searching for, and honestly probably at least "nearly-as" reliable as said list, because the average Joe Sixpack always has, and always will, be a lot better at asking a question and getting an answer than he will be at finding an answer to his question within the confines of a larger story.

    This devastates the large publishers' traffic.

    I'd come up with a conclusion here, but I'm too distracted wondering where I placed my violin. It's really small, it could probably be anywhere...

  • by spankalee on 6/10/25, 10:07 PM

    Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here:

    - If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves.

    Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.

  • by oliwarner on 6/11/25, 8:35 AM

    Google's demise is self-inflicted.

    They broke search by prioritising ads, then trusting the wrong, big publishers (eg every listacle from a big media network), broke their advanced search controls (domain blacklists, quotes that mean quotes, plus-and-minuses to alter things).

    Then they added their own LLM's analysis to searches, admitting that that their SERPs are dead. They were in this death-spiral well before LLMs became an alternative. I won't pretend that SEO wasn't making traditional search untenable, but the vector Google chose will make their key product obsolete.

    The thing I worry about is what they'll do to retain revenue. They have knowledge systems that cater to a lot more than what we normally search on. They have address data, know where people physically are right now, have live communication data on billions of users, know their shopping habits, and a thousand etceteras. Meta too. They have communication data on billions of people. How are these older software companies going to monetise the data they've amassed in an age when they are getting close to being able to replicate personas, model actual human behaviours?

  • by paradox460 on 6/10/25, 11:10 PM

    I don't use Google anymore, and haven't in over a year (I use kagi instead) but for finding information that could be buried deep within slow, ad ridden websites, the AI and quick question features are indispensable. Things like "is game XYZ available on gamepass" or "which is state is comparable in area to germany" are good examples of this

  • by jaredwiener on 6/10/25, 9:40 PM

    Honest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this --

    for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?

  • by torqueehmada on 6/11/25, 3:55 AM

    If nobody writes it, the LLM can't learn it. This is going to be a fascinating shift of resources. I suspect it will have the inverse effect of eroding traditional journalism outlets to retrofit for the new model, while boosting smaller competitors, but with everyone going to subscription based. The content creators could make a significant amount of money.

    Then again, this would be a great time for state-sponsored media, if we didn't have such an anti-intellectual assclown as president and the lacky congress/scotus.

  • by felipeerias on 6/11/25, 4:38 AM

    The emergence of AI tools and closed platforms will reduce the importance of advertising on the open Web, and eventually of the open Web itself.

    One possible way this plays out is that attention and investment move towards proprietary ecosystems, with large AI companies being able to secure exclusive access to closed information sources while everyone else is reduced to getting what they can from a dwindling open Web.

    Another possibility might be that new standards allow interoperability between AI agents and open content providers, including microtransactions between them, and creating a new marketplace for information.

    https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si...

  • by dataviz1000 on 6/10/25, 11:03 PM

    Take it to the next level, integrate the chatbot into a browser extension side panel. Let people navigate to websites that contain the information.

    This will work. It will allow the chatbot to provide up to the minute data and information from the source. It will allow the user to maintain context -- like a popup dialog allows the user to maintain visual context. And, it will incentivize content creators to curate and provide information and data as people will be visiting their websites.

    If anyone thinks this might be a good idea also, I've already laid down the foundation approaching a browser extension side panel as a framework like Electron or Playwright and did the grunt work. [0]

    I put the VSCode IPC and other core libraries into this project. The IPC is important because a browser extension with this use case requires looking at a browser as a distributed system of javascript processes that communicate a a dozen different ways

    > Environments: Node.js main process, Node.js child process, Node.js worker thread, browser main thread (window), iframe, dedicated Web Worker, Shared Worker, Service Worker, AudioWorklet.

    > Communication: fetch/XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, EventSource, BroadcastChannel, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics, localStorage storage events, MessageChannel/MessagePort, postMessage/onmessage, Worker.postMessage/worker.onmessage, parentPort.postMessage/parentPort.on('message'), ChildProcess.send/process.on('message'), stdin/stdout streams.

    and VSCode provides a protocol interface with only `onMessage` and `send` so I can define my own that are not provided creating a consistent API for communication.

    Regardless, I have it working but it needs to be completely rewritten.

    [0]https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal

  • by awongh on 6/10/25, 11:22 PM

    I was considering starting a business where the main traffic source would be SEO based, but based on all the gloom and doom around search I decided to hold off.

    Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.

  • by simonw on 6/11/25, 2:46 AM

    This story has a few instances of suspicious numbers like these:

    > When Dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for around 60% of the company’s traffic, Vogel said. Today, it is about one-third. Overall traffic is growing, thanks to efforts including newsletters and the MyRecipes recipe locker.

    If traffic is up but percentage of that traffic from search is down, does that mean search traffic is down overall? Or does it mean that strategies to diversify their traffic sources are working as planned?

  • by jmyeet on 6/11/25, 3:09 AM

    Previously, if you searched for "mortgage calculator" in Google, you'd get one at the top, embedded in the page. It was fast, simple and did what you wanted. I guess because of "competition" it was removed at some point. Now all the top results are terrible. The sites are slow. They ask too many questsions. They're clearly trying to generate leads and sell ads. Whereas Google's just... worked. There are good calculators out there but they don't rank as highly.

    How exactly is this good for consumers?

    My point is that a lot of publishers are what I call "low value". They're rent-seekers. They have easily obtained information, often user-generated, and their role is to gatekeep that and make you click just one more page to get a result because hey that's another slew of ads they can show you.

    I'm sympathetic to the argument that LLMs steal. At the same time, we have to recognize that a lot of publishers are intentionally useless rent-seekers so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them.

  • by ryao on 6/11/25, 7:23 AM

    This seems appropriate:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXwdRBxZ0U

    It took a little longer than predicted, but “Googlezon” is finally happening, with or without Google and Amazon.

  • by oytis on 6/10/25, 10:08 PM

    But... Google's AI summaries are wrong like at least 50% of the time.

  • by Mehuleo on 6/11/25, 5:48 AM

    This is definitely bad. But on a different note, I think this was inevitable, as the new generation's attention span keeps dropping rapidly with all the TikTok and Instagram shorts. I believe publishers will need to figure out shorter written content formats as well. Until then, Google and others that offer alternatives will have an edge. I'm not saying this is the only way forward—just part of the evolution. I believe publishers will evolve to adapt to this too.

  • by Agingcoder on 6/11/25, 12:06 AM

    I don’t really care about google’s ai features - I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines. I’ve stopped using google because it doesn’t work anymore - I used to be able to find what I want , and now I can’t. Everything is lost in a mess of ads and what seems to be a collection of random answers.

    I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result, since it works. I also read the news directly from various newspapers that I subscribe to to make sure they actually get money.

  • by Aziell on 6/11/25, 2:56 AM

    I use AI a lot myself and it definitely makes getting information faster but it feels like something’s missing, like the fun of digging for the truth yourself. These AI tools can just give you the answers, which saves time, but it also takes away a lot of depth and variety. Without realizing it, we might also be losing our ability to think independently.

    Do you think AI can really replace all the value traditional news brings?

  • by Hobadee on 6/10/25, 11:34 PM

    This one trick will cut down on listicles and click-bait!

  • by iambateman on 6/10/25, 11:10 PM

    If the vast majority of Google revenue comes from search, and search is under siege, why is the stock so unfazed?

    It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.

  • by amarant on 6/10/25, 11:33 PM

    Honestly, it's at least partially on the publishers in this case.

    I've started using AI to summarise articles for me because the endless SEO fluff has gotten to completely unbearable levels.

    If you publish an article with a sidetrack that's 8 pages long and completely irrelevant, don't get upset when I have some LLM summarize it to 3 bullet points instead. I'm not made of time, nor patience!

  • by darqis on 6/11/25, 8:06 AM

    Would you say that Google's search taking results from other sites and compiling them and presenting them as their own is piracy?

  • by deadbabe on 6/11/25, 2:16 AM

    These days chatbots are good enough that when I do use a search engine, I really just want pure search results, I’m not interested in getting another AI opinion. I am sick and tired of getting AI overviews for a google search. What’s a better search engine? Heck, it doesn’t even have to be “better”, I’m looking for different results, not just perfect matches.

  • by gkanai on 6/11/25, 12:54 AM

    I do a lot of product searches in Japanese and there is a ton of SEO spam on domains (.br but also many others) that are basically irrelevant to Japan. Google should be blocking all of that SEO spam but they can't seem to walk away from the ad revenue. There's no good domestic Japanese search engine so it's a defacto monopoly of bad search.

  • by phantom_wizard on 6/11/25, 1:06 PM

    They did it to themselves. I'm sure we will read books about their failure and the replacement of Google search with chats and llms. The outcome is quite peculiar, because those chats are a blessing but should we really give them our data away. Scary what they will do with it. It was already scary enough with Google.

  • by jgalt212 on 6/11/25, 2:09 AM

    1. This is self-limiting. If they drive the content producing sites out of business, what is Google AI search going to summarize?

    2. These chatbots must also be killing ad revenue on SERP pages. It's safe to assume these summaries are also reducing clicks on ad links just as they are reducing clicks on content links.

  • by scotty79 on 6/11/25, 12:32 PM

    Last decade or two was gradual exploration of how terrible and ad-infested you can get without people going away to somewhere else entirely. Now that a new elsewhere popped up everybody suddenly found out that instead of being knee deep in sewage, it already reached their mouth and nose.

  • by crest on 6/10/25, 10:00 PM

    How ironic that the WSJ decided to make the text unreadable themselves just in case anyone cared to read it.

  • by AaronAPU on 6/11/25, 5:02 PM

    The other day I used Google to research something I didn’t know the answer to. It gave back a slightly reformatted piece of text which had been directly stolen from my own blog post.

    So not only did it steal my traffic, it elevated my random opinion to pseudo “official” truth.

  • by wnevets on 6/10/25, 10:58 PM

    Google simultaneously making search worse as more people use AI chatbots isn't helping their cause.

  • by mattl on 6/10/25, 10:35 PM

    News sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI is a scam.

    Pay for your news.

  • by wslh on 6/11/25, 3:16 AM

    Google devastated search for small and medium sized companies, with AI or without it they have not improved the search engine to get accurate results with very concrete searches that are not prompts.

  • by 725686 on 6/11/25, 1:35 AM

    "Searching" using AI is much faster and direct that traditional search. And with no ads.

  • by TiredOfLife on 6/11/25, 6:33 PM

    Same publishers that demanded Google to pay them for the privilege to link to them?

  • by Fairburn on 6/11/25, 9:57 PM

    Google, Bing etal.. are fast becoming irrelevant. At least as a search engine

  • by niemandhier on 6/11/25, 6:15 AM

    All I want is to go to the site of my favorite newspapers and see stuff that matters.

    Instead I get things like this:

    “Modern fathers have failed”

    “Man need to ditch the dadbod”

    “Equality means only man should be drafted”

    They have tons of great and deeply investigated content, but they throw engagement bait into your face. In the end I use a search engine to extract a relevant subset of articles.

  • by patatero on 6/11/25, 7:06 AM

    This is Google's fault.

    They made Search worse so people have to resort to AI chatbots.

  • by bananalychee on 6/11/25, 4:37 AM

    I don't believe that Google's AI Overviews or even LLMs in general are to blame for the decline in traffic to news websites. ChatGPT launched with the GPT-3.5 model in November 2022 without a web search function, and had a training data cutoff date of September 2021. Google AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to generally poor reception initially, and ChatGPT Search launched in July 2024. The graph presented in the article reveals a trend starting as far back as April 2022, well before mass-market LLM products could extract useful information in real time, and it doesn't look like it's accelerated significantly. In fact, the WSJ series contradicts it. Prior data would likely reveal that the broad decline began much earlier, since it's well-known[1] that younger generations prefer to get their news from social media these days. Paywalls, quality degradation in search results, and mistrust in the objectivity of news coverage are likely contributing factors.

    I don't doubt that the shift from web searches to automated information extraction will pose new challenges to websites that rely on search engine optimization to drive new user traffic, especially for small/individual operators, and I'll be happy to witness the death of SEO if it comes to that, but blaming a new Google Search feature[2] for a long-running decline in traffic to online newspapers strikes me as a deflection from the slow death of their business model.

    P.S.: Google's AI Overviews are fairly respectful of content providers and link back to source material from the generated text.

    [1] https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-abandoning-news...

    [2] The current title of the article is "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools"

  • by rubyfan on 6/10/25, 11:06 PM

    Who would have thought we’d be looking for a better experience after Google let search turn to a steaming pile of shit filled with spam, popups and clickbait while violating our privacy with every vector possible?!?

  • by sreekanth850 on 6/11/25, 2:10 AM

    A day will come when auth is an essential part of blogging sites.

  • by DidYaWipe on 6/11/25, 2:07 AM

    What chatbots? The article talks about Google's (shitty) "AI"-generated answer summaries, but that's not a chatbot, and as far as I can see the article doesn't say where all these "chatbots" are hosted. How are people finding them?

    Very disappointing for WSJ.

  • by incomingpain on 6/11/25, 10:35 AM

    Practically every news site now needs archive.ph because of paywall.

    There's also a problem around trust in journalists being tremendously low.

  • by kevin_thibedeau on 6/11/25, 2:20 AM

    Google destroyed Google's search. You can't surface any factual, non-slop content through them any more.

  • by mitchbob on 6/10/25, 9:28 PM

  • by aucisson_masque on 6/10/25, 10:29 PM

    Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet.

    If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great.

    Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

  • by p1dda on 6/11/25, 5:28 AM

    Great news to see the abominable corporate news media wither and hopefully die.

  • by Tarsul on 6/10/25, 9:39 PM

    Anyone surprised? I mean that's just what Google does and did from the very early days. I am more ashamed that politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies in the last 25 years.

    We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?

  • by OutOfHere on 6/10/25, 9:52 PM

    I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.