Artificial Intelligence (AI) shows a lot of productivity promise for news publishers, but in its early iterations, AI is also proving to be perilous. E&P has been covering AI developments frequently, and this month we look at how Generative AI is changing the way people search for and retrieve information from AI-enabled search engines.
For the user, a query to an AI-enabled search engine may provide a thorough responses that satisfies their question. The risk remains that those response summaries may be flawed with fallacies, depending on how the AI engine was trained.
The other concern for news publishers is how users behave based on the search response. They may be satisfied with the result and sated, and resist scrolling down for additional search results and links to other sources, including news articles. That should trouble any news media business that relies on a healthy influx of web traffic and has for years invested in improving SEO performance.
We invited no less than 30 publishers about how they’re preparing for AI-search disruption. Some spoke on background; others opted not to comment at all, citing an uncertainty about what to do. There’s no shame in that. AI is new and developing at lightning speed, and we’re all just trying to figure out where this path is leading. But a few publishers are ahead of the curve and implementing new ways to nurture more direct relationships with readers/viewers/listeners, thereby relying less on search traffic. We tell two of their stories at the link:
Gretchen A. Peck 