Imagine a world in the not-too-distant future. There are no local newspapers and few national ones – nothing online let alone in print. The trade and specialist press has all but disappeared. Magazines are left as a luxury print product – lifestyle, design etc for coffee table browsing. But anything based more on news, analysis and comment has shut down online. As has most independent news.
The few outlets still surviving are sites run by public broadcasters like the BBC and trust-funded media like The Guardian. Beyond that, it’s corporate websites, government, some NGOs and the text messages of POTUS – on X or Truth Social depending on who the president is by then.
It’s an extreme worst case admittedly, but it’s one end result of a problem all publishers are now grappling with: AI-based search.
We’re so used to the tech giants eating our lunch over decades, wave after wave of disruptive algorithms, each one worse for mainstream media than the last, that publishers aren’t panicking. You could say they seem quite philosophical about it: ‘oh well, here we go again’.
But it is different this time. Not least because traditional search helped users find the information on your site – or that was the stated aim. It was manageable.
Now, AI search is scraping all that content and serving it up with little or no attribution. Publishers were faced with a fait accomplish. Now they have a hard choice: cooperate and get at least something for their content; or block and risk being ignored.
Both approaches have many pros and cons, and the issue has been much argued over in publishing events in the last few years.
Refuse the AI bots and you risk missing out in the results entirely. Worse, they scrape your content anyway. At a recent PPA roundtable of editors talking about their AI experiences, it was remarkable how many had seen the bots turn up to do their work anyway, despite implementing the code to say ‘no’.
Deal or no deal
Strike a deal with the AI engines to scrape you means you get some revenue but is it going to be enough? Perhaps for some big media brands but, as with online advertising trying to substitute for print, is it going to be anywhere near enough? Hope it’s not, but could it just be crumbs from the table of the AI platforms?
This may get you an attribution too, but will anyone click through? Publishers post on social in return for traffic, but social posts are short – the link becomes a ‘read more’. Users reading AI search results don’t need to do that to read more. They just scroll to read more.
Publishers are now experiencing this. Referrals from AI search are a fraction of what they were on traditional search.
As AI gets better and more powerful, this could decline further rather than recover.
The public is quite distrustful of AI. Even Google warns users to be cautious. Getting it wrong or not quite right may not be a disaster for what many people search for: is this film any good, or is that thing ‘worth it’ (a phrase that now seems to appear in every suggested top search from Google).
For other searches, it poses more of a problem – like the news, or views on current affairs or many of the areas of the culture wars, which seems to reach into ever more public discussion.
AI’s bland responses can make it seem balanced when it’s not. Spotting hallucinations can be hard – and how many readers will really bother to check it all?
But AI will get better. It will learn and provide better answers. That’s if there’s anything to base it on. No referrals affects remuneration and profile. Those in turn can make it difficult to keep your title going. Publishers will have to double down on efforts they’re already making to change their business models for survival; brands strong enough for direct traffic, membership models, digital subscriptions, direct relationships like email newsletters, large enough social followings to earn revenue and a few other things that work for some publishers, like Apple News.
These measures can attract certain readers who don’t trust AI and do like curated and original content from brands they know and love. But is it enough? Reaching more than the existing ‘converted’ will be really hard and perhaps a hiding to nothing in today’s misinformation age.
As always, it comes back to trust. The poor image of journalists used to be unfortunate but now it’s detrimental to survival. We’re not alone. Many professionals are finding large parts of the public turning against them in the culture wars battlefield: lawyers, judges, civil servants and even doctors. Like them, journalists too need to get across what used to be more widely understood: that these are professionals who have their own opinion but are capable of making decisions based on the law in the case of judges (in the UK if not the US), or balance in the case of journalists, or neutrality in the case of civil servants.
These days, trying to explain ‘we’re just professionals trying to be fair and decent’ is more likely to get you a big laugh than professional respect.
We’ve been here before. This time, it will be existential for some – again. But most of us will survive. That dystopian future may not be as bad as my worst case. But it could be.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
