Publishers are well-accustomed to Google’s familiar PR playbook — offering placating promises of more traffic and better-quality clicks to defuse backlash whenever it rolls out major search changes, even as the numbers often tell a different story. With Google AI Overviews, it’s no different.
Google has sought to quell publisher fears over the impact of AI Overviews on their search traffic in the last few weeks, with Liz Reid, vp and head of Google Search, writing an extensive blog post stating that third-party efforts to measure the impact of AI overviews on referral traffic “inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic.”
But publishers have seen this movie before. New publisher data reinforces the more familiar pattern: search referral traffic is declining year over year.
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