AI search has had little impact on referral traffic to date, based on Comscore’s desktop user data in the U.S. (Nick Hagar, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Summary
- AI Overviews haven't affected Google's referral traffic to news sites - yet.
- Blocking OpenAI's crawler or having partnerships doesn't impact ChatGPT referrals to publishers.
- ChatGPT sends users to non-existent pages 30% of the time, mostly fake NYT links.
