Google’s search chief rejects this strategy of licensing news content amid AI controversy

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ZDNET Highlights

• Traffic and links remain Google’s main publisher strategy.
• The individual reference is still under internal testing.
• Google directly acknowledged the publisher’s struggles.

Google has no plans to create a standardized API or universal licensing system for news content, the company’s search chief said last week, echoing proposals from media advocates who see such an arrangement as the industry’s best path to AI-era revenue.

“The short answer is no,” Nick Fox, Google’s SVP of knowledge and information, told me. AI Inside Podcast When asked whether Google would adopt a standardized licensing model. “I believe the core of the way Google will partner with news organizations and websites will be through traffic and links within these experiences.”

Fox’s comments come as publishers continue to grapple with declining referral traffic and an uncertain relationship with AI-powered search. A seer interactive study The report, released in September, found that organic click-through rates on queries with AI overviews dropped 61%, with paid CTRs falling 68%. separate research Bain & Company published in February revealed that 80% of consumers now rely on AI summaries in at least 40% of their searches, leading to an estimated 15% to 25% decline in organic web traffic.

In September, Google itself filed a court document Claiming that “the open web is already in rapid decline,” a statement that appears to contradict what Fox told me at Google I/O a few months ago, where he made the announcement.The web is booming” and cited a 45% increase in crawled pages.

Too: Google seems to be losing its grip on search – and what do I use in its place now

My co-host Jeff Jarvis came up with a straightforward pitch in our follow-up interview: What if news organizations created APIs to make their content available to AI systems in a standardized way? this is an idea Jeff recently wrote about And it’s circulating in media circles as a potential path toward licensing revenue that doesn’t rely on the old traffic-and-clicks model. OpenAI has struck deals with publishers including the Associated Press, News Corp and Axel Springer. Google has made similar arrangements with select partners, but there is nothing analogous to a universal system.

Fox instead pointed to Google’s recently announced business partnerships with more than 3,000 publications in more than 50 countries and features like preferred sourceWhich lets users pin favorite outlets to Top Stories. Google is investing in ways to drive traffic, not ways to license content at scale.

Too: Google gives you control over your search results – how to see your favorite sites first

“One of the announcements we made this week was that we’re really improving the links within our experience, increasing the number of them, as well as increasing the introduction to them, because we believe deeply in that,” Fox said.

But Fox also adopted a different tone than May. When I pressed him on how Google bridges the trust gap with publishers who are seeing their analytics decline while hearing executives say everything is fine, he acknowledged the tension more directly than before.

“Certainly, there are sites that are struggling,” Fox said. “And of course, I’m sympathetic to sites that are struggling. As a company, we care deeply, deeply, deeply about the health of the Web. I personally care deeply about the health of the Web.”

Fox emphasized the study of traffic declines, saying at least one report attributed the loss to AI overviews to events that actually occurred before the feature launched. “There was a report of one site that had a double-digit decrease, probably over a 50% decrease in traffic, and it was claimed that it was linked to AI and search,” he said. In that case, “the decline in traffic occurred even before we announced our AI overview.”

Fox said the AI ​​mode, which has grown to 75 million daily active users since launching earlier this year, represents an “expansive moment” for both search and the web. Users are asking longer, more complex questions, he said, with query length increasing two to three times compared to traditional search. In other words, AI is creating new types of searches that did not exist before, thereby growing the overall pie rather than depleting existing traffic.

personal story is still coming

One of the more interesting features teased by Google at I/O was personalized context, the ability to pull from Gmail, Drive, and Docs to deliver hyper-personalized responses. This was positioned as a core capability, something that would differentiate Google’s AI search from competitors like Perplexity and ChatGPT’s search features. Seven months later, it’s still not here.

“This is an area we will continue to work on,” Fox said. “It’s important that we get it right. It’s important that we do it in a way that’s actually useful. And then, we need to get the user permissions right with it. Some of us are testing it internally and working through it, but have yet to come to terms with the public rollout.”

Also: Are you worried about AI in your search results? Try These 8 Google Alternatives

Fox was more specific about where AI modes are gaining popularity globally. In addition to strong acceptance in the US, he highlighted “really strong resonance” in India, Brazil and Indonesia.

He said markets without strong local content benefit from AI search because it can provide answers from sources in languages ​​and regions that traditional search might not surface. “It kind of becomes cross-language, cross-border, and you’re able to provide a response, you’re able to provide a link that might not be available specifically in that market.”

This highlights how AI search can fill the gaps where local content does not exist. Whether this is good news for local publishers and creators in those markets, who now face competition from AI-synthesized answers based on content from elsewhere, is an entirely different question.

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