Will You Soon Be Getting All Your News From Google?

Corporate Officers May Soon Turn to Search Engines for Financial News

It’s no secret that C-suite officers are avid news readers, especially in their areas of business interest, like finance, manufacturing, the economy, and workforce issues.

Historically that’s meant leafing through the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, or The New York Times. More recently that’s meant scrolling through the web pages of your favorite business publication or social media page like LinkedIn or X.

Will 2024 flip the script and see Google becoming dominant as a major platform for news?

That’s the takeaway from an article in the December 14 issue of The Wall Street Journal.

The article, titled “News Publishers See Google’s AI Search Tool as a Traffic-Destroying Nightmare” states that an artificial intelligence search tool is currently being tested by Google, with a massive 10 million user test base, that gauges how users would react if Google immersed AI into its search platform.

Doing so would have big ramifications for news media companies. Currently, Google handles 40% (known in the search engine business as “referrals) of news media online search traffic.

With Google’s new AI-fueled “Search Generative Experience”, 75% of the time news readers wouldn’t have to be bothered being steered to a media sight for news and information. They’d be able to get the information they need from the new Google AI search tool.

For example, instead of a golf fan being sent to Golf Digest for the latest Taylor Made driver review, that reader could get everything he or she needed from Google. Or, an avid investor may find the latest news about Nvidia or Tesla on the Google AI site instead of being redirected to The Wall Street Journal or MarketWatch as has traditionally been the case.

The Threat Is All Too Real for News Organizations

“AI and large language models have the potential to destroy journalism and media brands as we know them,” notes Axel Springer Chairman and CEO Mathias Dopfner (the media company owns Business Insider and Politico, among other publications.)

For its part, Google notes it’s nowhere near finished with its Search Generative Experience testing, but media publishers have seen enough. With Google one day sending significantly less traffic to news platforms, publishers estimate they could lose up to 40% of their reader traffic.

“Digital publishing is entering a transformational period and under attack,” said Ross Levinsohn, former CEO of the Arena Group, which owns Sports Illustrated and TheStreet, in comments to The Journal.

Down the road, news readers will have to reckon with that attack and choose their news-reading platforms accordingly.




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