There really is an AI singularity close-at-hand. But not quite the one you might have been expecting! Welcome to the curious hypothesis of Zero-Clicks AI-mageddon.
The Dominance of Google
It is perhaps useful context to start with the ongoing dominance of Google, as the gateway for most users to the World Wide Web. In the most recent full year of 2023, 80% of all trackable website visits came from a combination of organic (53%) and paid (27%) search, with the balance from direct visits or referrals, including social. Of that 80%, Google enjoyed a market share of 91% - so 0.80x0.91= 73% of all traffic to all websites comes via that single search bar, folks!
When one considers that a fifth of worldwide retail sales are now made online (and that is expected to rise to a quarter by 2027), it’s hardly surprising that most small and medium-sized businesses are literally obsessed with how they rank on Google. I am not going to say I predicted all this more than 16 years ago, but I did. Lol.
The Merry Dance
A few times a year, Google tunes its algorithm. Despite a lot of nonsense that you read in the (largely snake oil) SEO Sector, the underlying drivers of how Google ranks sites are fundamentally the same as what there were at turn-on in 1996. The annual updates are more about countering the tricks and spam people deploy to try to game their rankings.
Even so, this “Google Dance” really can make or break a small business. A little bedroom hobby becomes thriving garage business employing half a street of people, then perhaps vanishes just as quickly overnight. Part of the problem is the reverse-exponential nature of “visibility”: the average click-through rate (CTR) for position 1 on Google is 37.15% and for position 2 it’s 14.91%. But by the time you get to position 9, it’s already under 2%! So dropping from the top of page 1 to near the bottom can be the difference between a viable and a completely non-viable business.
So what does AI have to do with all this?
In early 2023, a very meaningful disruption to the world of search started to happen. Microsoft launched the new Bing AI search. Whilst Google has retained a 95% share of Mobile search (now over 50% of all searches), Microsoft has since steadily eaten into its share of Desktop search; rising to 10.51% in January 2024 (versus just 3.36% in July 2018). There has also been an emergence of many new “challenger” AI Search Engines, including Komo, Claude, and Perplexity; all of which are growing at >10% a quarter (albeit from a low base).
Silicon Valley is only too aware how quickly their shiny little business can lose its lustre. Traffic to Facebook, for example, has fallen in every month since February 2021. In June 2023, visits to the site were down 13.5% on the previous year, and down 25% on the summer of 2019. So, Google would be unwise not to respond to this exponential shift in both technology and consumer taste. People already say “Facebook is for old people”.
And respond they have. Google have finally brought out Gemini (from behind long closed doors) and rolled-out “AI Overviews” in their US search results. Bye bye SEO. Hello AIO. Whilst it is still early days – and one has to be cautious – this new feature has the potential to significantly impact on how search results appear and (more importantly) on the traffic that Google delivers to the websites of the world.
Enshittification
The word of 2023. Apparently. Coined by Cory Doctrow in his excellent piece for Wired, it describes the inevitable consequence of "two-sided markets," where the platform sitting between buyers and sellers can build market dominance, then exploit that dominance to take an ever-larger share of the overall transaction value:
“Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
So how does this apply to Google and what does it have to do with AI? Put simply, the AI is trained on the data Google has indexed from across the web for over 20 years. When someone asks the right sort of query, an AI Overview is triggered – in place of (the top of) normal search results – that answers the question for the user. This way, the user need not actually click on any results and go piece together the answer themselves. The AI has done all the hard work for you. Even Google themselves promote the service as “Google will do the Googling for you”. That hardly sounds promising if you run a small business out of your garage and 95% of all your business comes from people Googling.
This presents a so-called “walled garden” scenario; where the traffic stays where it originated; in Google’s web properties. And whilst (a) sources are quoted in the Overviews, and (b) Google claims the CTR% on source links is the same or higher than traditional search results, it seems intuitive to surmise that ubiquitous AI answers will, over time, prevent many people from clicking on source and search results altogether. Gartner agree; forecasting a 25% drop in Search Engine volumes (across all websites) by 2026. The feared ultimate outcome is referred to as “Zero Clicks” or – more colourfully – Googlepocalypse or AI-mageddon.
Is the end of the world really nigh?
Recent (early June 24) research from SearchEngineLand suggests Google have massively dialled-down the frequency of AI-Overview forced instigation from 84% of queries initially to just 15% today. In part, this appears to be a reaction to (a) overwhelmingly negative feedback from content creators, news publishers, and online businesses, (b) legal threats over copyright infringement, and (c) a hallucination rate (i.e. completely wrong answers) nearing 5%, which has attracted some negative publicity. Advising people to eat a rock a day to keep the doctor away isn’t a good look.
But users themselves generally like the feature. So, the dialling down is probably more about tuning the model, not least to make sure Google doesn’t “eat itself” by losing the 77% of its total revenue that still derives from paid advertising. After all, unless those ads somehow feature prominently alongside the AI Overviews, Google risk zero-clicks for their paying customers too!
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you
So, the jury is still out. But I must say, I see this as part of a broader trend – which started over 8 years ago – of Google continuously tweaking their results page layout. Over time, this has led to a greater density of paid ads in the real estate through various means, and a recycling of other people’s content in Google-served snippets, graphs, and panels. Together with regular algorithm changes, the effect has been a noticeable drop in the visibility of (and therefore traffic to) established web properties, whilst Google’s profits have soared by 15% year-on-year.
The New York Magazine has lost 32% of its Google Search traffic in the last six months, while GQ.com shrank 26%. More broadly, Sistrix data reveals all but 15 of the top 70 news publishers tracked by the Press Gazette saw falls in their visibility scores, following the March 24 Core update. Of these, almost half (33) saw double-digit declines. If you’ve seen a lot less, recently, of Wikipedia or the BBC, but a great deal more of Pinterest and Reddit, it is not just your imagination. Something truly game-changing is happening.
So what can we expect to see next?
I hate making predictions. Even when they work out right. But it seems to me inevitable that the AI-driven rights issues we have already seen in recorded music and the art market are coming soon to a screen and a business near you. Generative AI may be many wonderful things, but it is also (arguably & allegedly) theft of intellectual property on an industrial scale. If you make a living from the creation or curation of content, a walled garden regurgitation - with limited or no attribution and compensation - must be fought to the death, or it is an existential threat to your livelihood.
We can likely expect further class action lawsuits for copyright infringement (similar to that already underway from major publishers and artists groups). Others will close private deals to license their content to AI Providers for very large sums of money (like the Associated Press, Reddit, the Financial Times, and News Corp have already done). Smaller content sites may simply take their toys away and de-index from Google altogether. Trust me, lots of people are talking about it (even if no one yet has the courage to cut the cord). Anti-trust actions from regulatory & competition authorities are also possible. And from Google itself (and others) we can expect to see unpredictable (perhaps even sudden) shifts in revenue or profit model, which shareholders may not be happy about.
Final Thoughts
The end of the world is oft foretold, yet here we all still are. However, we are entering a period of tumultuous change in how consumers find and connect with online businesses, driven by Generative AI. And wise businesses should lay their contingency plans well, and diversify their business model where possible.
© David Viney 2024. Licensed for re-use with attribution under CC BY 4.0
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