“Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of websites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.”
A year after AI Overviews, Google impressions are up 49% and clicks to websites are down 30%. Google used to crawl two pages for every visitor it sent. Now it crawls 18. OpenAI crawls 1,500 and sends one. The sites that wrote the training data are paying for the answers that replace them.