Translating Google
The Head of Google Search has a message for publishers, which may need to be put into plainer English.
Google loves to put out talking points in blogs that summarise what they are seeing in the world’s data, but always stop short of releasing any usable information. Releases are positioned as scientific, but with none of the calculations that would let you as the humble reader understand how the conclusions were reached.
The latest is here; AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks in which Liz Reid the Head of Search addresses the concern from publishers that AI Overviews and AI mode is drastically cutting traffic delivery to their sites, and in turn reducing their revenues while Google increases it’s rent seeking on their content.
It may be helpful to translate the corporate words into plainer English. Liz Reid’s original words are in italics. The rest are all my interpretation…
Liz Reid, Google: AI is driving the most significant upgrade of the Google Search experience ever. With AI Overviews and more recently AI Mode, people are able to ask questions they could never ask before.
Translation: “We’ve established a dominant position in search discovery which we want to migrate to a blended search / conversational experience, without changing the terms of trade for publishers.”
Our data shows people are happier with the experience and are searching more than ever as they discover what Search can do now. At the same time, we’ve recently heard some questions about what this means for traffic to websites from Google.
“We have some internal definitions of consumer happiness that we won’t share, and external unhappiness amongst publishers that we want them to stop sharing.”
Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year.
“If the widest possible definition of click volume had gone up or been the same we would have said that. We won’t give you any actual numbers, but you can assume it’s down by a low enough single digit percentage which allows us to reach for ‘relatively’.”
Additionally, average click quality has increased and we’re actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago (by quality clicks, we mean those where users don’t quickly click back — typically a signal that a user is interested in the website).
“The drop off in volume is in the single page visit category that makes up a huge percentage of search traffic. If we remove those by answering the query ourselves, of course the average time spent goes up, that’s how averages work.”
This data is in contrast to third-party reports that inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic — often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search.
“Only Google can measure search traffic accurately, don’t believe your own metrics. And by the way the clickless search thing has been a trend for a while.”
So what’s going on? With AI Overviews, people are searching more and asking new questions that are often longer and more complex. In addition, with AI Overviews people are seeing more links on the page than before. More queries and more links mean more opportunities for websites to surface and get clicked.
“We are seeing more demand for information, and we’ll keep using links as a way to reassure users they can trust the answers, and also as a proxy for publisher discovery even though no evidence shows that discovery turns into traffic.”
For some questions where people are looking for a quick answer, like “when is the next full moon,” people may be satisfied with the initial response and not click further. This has also been true for other answer features we’ve added, like the Knowledge Graph or sports scores.
“We became a proxy publisher many cycles ago with the ‘one box’. This is just more of that so don’t sweat it.”
While overall traffic to sites is relatively stable, the web is vast, and user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others. People are increasingly seeking out and clicking on sites with forums, videos, podcasts, and posts where they can hear authentic voices and first-hand perspectives.
People are also more likely to click into web content that helps them learn more — such as an in-depth review, an original post, a unique perspective or a thoughtful first-person analysis. Sites that meet these evolving user needs are benefiting from this shift and are generally seeing an increase in traffic.
“There are winners and losers of course. We did a deal with Reddit for AI training so that comes up a lot, and we do $50bn a year from YouTube so guess what?”
As a search company, we care passionately — perhaps more than any other company — about the health of the web ecosystem. We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day and believe that Search’s value exchange with the web remains strong.
“We have a 90% share of the search market and it generates $200bn a year in revenue, the largest segment of the Alphabet empire by far. Our shareholders ensure we care.”
We take a distinct approach in how we build our AI experiences: they’re built to highlight the web. In other words, it’s not the web or AI — it’s both.
“Which means we have to protect the existing business while leveraging it to build out the new AI experience. By making our experience dual minded we make it almost impossible for publishers to want discovery on the open web without also accepting our AI terms of trade.”
And our AI responses feature prominent links, visible citation of sources, and in-line attribution. And websites always have control over how content is highlighted or included in Search with open web protocols, which we respect and follow.
“Regulators haven’t caught up yet. So we can cite the sources without explicit permission and point to some tools which allow publishers to disappear themselves from 90% of the web and that’s ok.”
We believe that AI will be one of the most expansionary moments for the web, empowering us all to ask vastly more questions and creators to reach more deeply engaged audiences. We’ll continue to help businesses, creators and websites seize these opportunities as we build this future together.
“I know you thought we might address the elephant in the room of publisher traffic cratering with these new tools. But that’s not really our concern here. We’re pivoting to AI and to supporting individual creators on YouTube rather than taking any responsibility for sustainable trusted information. Sorry guys!”