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Like most people, my wife types a search into Google many times each day. We work from home, so our family room doubles as a conference room. Whenever we're in a meeting, and a question about anything comes up, she Googles it.
This is the same as it's been for years. But what happens next has changed.
Instead of clicking on one of the search result links, she more often than not reads the AI summary. These days, she rarely clicks on any of the sites that provide the original information that Google's AI summarizes.
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When I spoke to her about this, Denise acknowledged that she actually visits sites less frequently. But she also pointed out that, for topics where she's well-versed, she has noticed the AI is sometimes wrong. She said she takes the AI results with a grain of salt, but they often provide basic enough information that she needs to look no further. If in doubt, she does dig deeper.
So that's where we are today. More and more users are like my wife, getting data from the AI and never visiting websites (and therefore never giving content creators a chance to be compensated for their work).
Worse, more and more people are trusting AI, so not only are they making it harder for content creators to make a living, but they are often getting hallucinatory or incorrect information. Since they never visit the original sources of information, they have little impetus to cross-check or verify what they read.
The impact of AI scraping
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince offered some devastating statistics. He used the ratio of the number of pages crawled compared to the number of pages fed to readers as a metric.
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