“There’s no getting around the decline in traffic”: Another apocalyptic roundup on what’s happening with search. (Klaudia Jaźwińska, Columbia Journalism Review)
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AI Mode has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and India, says Google. (Abner Li, 9to5Google)
Generative AI models love to cite Reuters and Axios, Muck Rack study finds. Major models cite journalism in nearly half of responses that require recency. (Andrew Deck, NiemanLab)
Surprising no one, new report from The Pew Research Center says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks. (Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica)
“Own the interface, control the signal and reshape the economics”: The next browser wars are here—and AI wants the ad dollars too. (Krystal Scanlon, Digiday)
How AI Companies Turn Your Browser Into Their Business Model
OpenAI will launch a browser, Perplexity has just released Comet, and YouTubers are going full clickbait mode: "NEW AI Browser is INSANE!🤯" (Really? It's insane to chat with tabs? That word gets used pretty liberally these days, considering it's AI-bros getting excited about summarizing five YouTube videos simultaneously while doing important thought leadership. Anyhow.) The...
You shall not pass… unless you pay: Cloudflare has launched a private beta enabling customers to allow, charge, or block bot-access to their content. For it to work, bot operators such as OpenAI or Google would have to use a new protocol named Web Bot Auth and be willing to pay.
Google AI Mode Live In US: Tests Deep Search, Live Search, Personalization, Custom Charts, Shopping & Agentic. And no, Search Console data will not include breakdowns for AI Mode and AI Overviews. (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable)
Testing Dia: The AI Browser Betting on a Future Beyond Chrome and Siri
For the last ten days, I've been using Dia, a new AI-enhanced web browser. So far, it's not going great. But first, let's look at the premise. Several players are racing to slap AI onto our everyday web use, betting that we're not ditching the whole "sitting in front of a screen to get things...
Another fun one: Cloudflare CEO warns of AI-driven “existential threat” to publishers as search traffic dwindles amid bot-fueled content skimming. (Christine Wang, Axios)
The rise of retrieval bots raises questions about data ownership, monetization, and the future of the open web. (Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post)
Google’s AI Mode could deal a devastating blow to the web’s business model. (Thomas Germain, BBC)
Metrics mutate: SEO rankings and clicks out, “embedding relevance” and “chunk retrieval” in as GenAI rewrites the rules of engagement. (Duane Forrester Decodes)
Google tests NotebookLM’s chatty AI podcast on Search.
