Life Inhale

As much as AI “search” results have changed your internet experience, it’s nothing compared to the way it’s changed things for online publishers. For the entirety of the web’s brief history, using every search engine optimization trick to achieve a high page rank and appear among the top few search results was the name of the internet game. The quest to achieve search result prominence drove nearly every textual element of internet design. But then everything changed. Google stopped sending traffic to web publishers and instead started inhaling the content it indexed and providing searchers with concise summaries of what they were after. Goodbye links, hello answers. Oh, and goodbye web traffic. The strategy may have saved you a click, but it leaves one wondering if anything can save online publishers. Their golden goose is now quite literally sucking the life out of them. How bad is it? Publishers are considering the nuclear option. AdWeek: Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search. “For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue. Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.”