Contrary to promises made by AI companies, AI chatbots are proving to be a poor substitute for web search when it comes to driving traffic to sites.
Web search has been the driving source of traffic to websites, large and small, for decades. Once of the major concerns many publishers had with AI is whether it would devastate publishers by not directing internet users to sites to the same degree as search engines. AI companies tried to address the issue with a variety of factors, including attestation links to the websites whose data served as the basis for a chatbot’s response.
Unfortunately, according to Forbes, a new report by TollBit proves things are not panning out the way AI companies promised, despite AI chatbots being responsible for significantly higher demand on websites.
“We are seeing an influx of bots that are hammering these sites every time a user asks a question,” CEO Toshit Panigrahi told Forbes. “The amount of demand for publisher content is nontrivial.”
At the heart of the issue is a change in how AI companies interact with content, as opposed to traditional search engines. Search engines specialize in sending internet users to websites. In contrast, AI chatbots hoover up data from websites to present to users without them ever visiting the site. In some cases, users may have absolutely no idea where the answers to their questions are coming from.
Nathan Schultz, CEO of Chegg, the edtech firm that sued Google as a result of its AI agents causing a loss of traffic, highlighted the importance of this understanding between websites and search engines.
“It’s time to say no,” Schultz told Forbes. “When you break that contract, that is not right.”
As Forbes goes on to highlight, none of this even begins to address the issues with AI companies not respecting sites’ efforts to block AI scrapers, with ones like Perplexity accused of ignoring site preferences and continuing to scrape content, including paywalled content, without permission.
All told, the report highlights the ongoing issues that remain with the rise of AI and underscores the challenges publishers are facing in the current market upheaval.
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