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ZDNET's key takeaways
Traffic and links remain Google's core publisher strategy.
Personal Context is still in internal testing.
Google acknowledged publisher struggles directly.
Google has no plans to build a standardized API or universal licensing system for news content, the company's search chief said last week, pushing back on proposals from media advocates who see such arrangements as the industry's best path to AI-era revenue.
"The short answer is no," Nick Fox, Google's SVP of knowledge and information, told me on the AI Inside podcast when asked whether Google would pursue a standardized licensing model. "I believe that the core of the way that Google will partner with news organizations and websites overall will be through traffic and links within these experiences."
Fox's comments come as publishers continue to grapple with declining referral traffic and an uncertain relationship with AI-powered search. A Seer Interactive study released in September found organic click-through rates fell 61% on queries featuring AI Overviews, with paid CTRs dropping 68%. Separate research from Bain & Company published in February found that 80% of consumers now rely on AI summaries in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%.
In September, Google itself filed a court document claiming the "open web is already in rapid decline," a statement that seemed to contradict what Fox had told me just months earlier at Google I/O, where he declared the "web is thriving" and cited a 45% increase in pages crawled.
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