AI search pushing an already weakened media ecosystem to the brink
AI-generated summaries now appearing regularly in Google searches discourage users from clicking through to source articles
Generative artificial intelligence assistants like ChatGPT are cutting into traditional online search traffic, depriving news sites of visitors and impacting the advertising revenue they desperately need, in a crushing blow to an industry already fighting for survival.
“The next three or four years will be incredibly challenging for publishers everywhere. No one is immune from the AI summaries storm gathering on the horizon,” warned Matt Karolian, vice-president of research and development at Boston Globe Media.
“Publishers need to build their own shelters or risk being swept away.”
While data remains limited, a recent Pew Research Centre study reveals that AI-generated summaries now appearing regularly in Google searches discourage users from clicking through to source articles.
When AI summaries are present, users click on suggested links half as often compared to traditional searches. This represents a devastating loss of visitors for online media sites that depend on traffic for both advertising revenue and subscription conversions.
According to Northeastern University professor John Wihbey, these trends “will accelerate, and pretty soon we will have an entirely different web”.
The dominance of tech giants like Google and Meta has already slashed online media advertising revenue, forcing publishers to pivot towards paid subscriptions.
But Wihbey noted that subscriptions also depend on traffic, and paying subscribers alone are not sufficient to support major media organisations.
The Boston Globe group has begun seeing subscribers sign up through ChatGPT, offering a new touchpoint with potential readers, Karolian said. However, “these remain incredibly modest compared to other platforms, including even smaller search engines”.
Other AI-powered tools like Perplexity are generating even fewer new subscriptions, he added.
To survive what many see as an inevitable shift, media companies are increasingly adopting GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) – a technique that replaces traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
This involves providing AI models with clearly labelled content, good structure, comprehensible text, and a strong presence on social networks and forums like Reddit that get crawled by AI companies.
But a fundamental question remains: “Should you allow OpenAI crawlers to basically crawl your website and your content?” asks Thomas Peham, CEO of optimisation start-up OtterlyAI.
Burned by aggressive data collection from major AI companies, many news publishers have chosen to fight back by blocking AI crawlers from accessing their content.
“We just need to ensure that companies using our content are paying fair market value,” argued Danielle Coffey, who heads the News/Media Alliance trade organisation.
Some progress has been made on this front. Licensing agreements have emerged between major players, such as The New York Times and Amazon, Google and Associated Press, and Mistral and Agence France-Presse, among others.
But the issue is far from resolved, as several major legal battles are underway, most notably The New York Times’ blockbuster lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Publishers face a dilemma: blocking AI crawlers protects their content but reduces exposure to potential new readers. Faced with this challenge, “media leaders are increasingly choosing to reopen access”, Peham observed.
Yet even with open access, success is not guaranteed. According to OtterlyAI data, media outlets represent just 29 per cent of citations offered by ChatGPT, trailing corporate websites at 36 per cent.
And while Google search has traditionally privileged sources recognised as reliable, “we don’t see this with ChatGPT”, Peham noted.
The stakes extend beyond business models. According to the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, about 15 per cent of people under 25 now use generative AI to get their news.
Given ongoing questions about AI sourcing and reliability, this trend risks confusing readers about information origins and credibility – much like social media did before it.
“At some point, someone has to do the reporting,” Karolian said. “Without original journalism, none of these AI platforms would have anything to summarise.”
Perhaps with this in mind, Google is already developing partnerships with news organisations to feed its generative AI features, suggesting potential paths forward.
“I think the platforms will realise how much they need the press,” predicted Wihbey – though whether that realisation comes soon enough to save struggling newsrooms remains an open question.
Meta changes course on open-source AI as China pushes ahead with advanced models
Zuckerberg’s latest AI musing is a backslide from just a year ago, when he published an essay titled ‘Open Source AI is the Path Forward’
Facebook parent Meta Platforms, a major proponent of open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models with its Llama family, has indicated it would be more “careful” going down the open-source road, a move that contrasts with China’s embrace of open-source.
In fact, China has probably found the path to “surpass the US in AI” thanks to the momentum in the country’s vibrant open-source AI ecosystem, according to Andrew Ng, a renowned computer scientist known for his work in AI and the field of deep learning.
Wu, an adjunct professor at Stanford University’s computer science department, praised China’s open AI ecosystem, where companies compete against each other in a “Darwinian life-or-death struggle” to advance foundational models. In a post published on DeepLearning.AI, the education platform he co-founded, Wu noted that the world’s top proprietary models were still from frontier US labs, while the top open models were mostly from China.
Chinese companies have been launching open-source models in quick succession in recent weeks. Alibaba Group Holding and Zhipu AI rolled out their latest reasoning and video models this past week.
Alibaba claimed its Wan 2.2 video tool was the industry’s “first open-source video generation models incorporating the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture” to help users unleash film-level creativity. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Zhipu boasted its GLM-4.5 as China’s “most advanced open-source MoE model”, as it secured third place globally and first place among both domestic and open-source models based on the average score across “12 representative benchmarks”.
Wu wrote in his post that US labs’ more secretive approach to developing foundational models, including poaching talent through hefty pay cheques, meant that knowledge spread within the industry slowly and at a high cost.
Wu’s comments came as Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company would be less open-source than it has been, citing security concerns as AI technology rapidly develops. “We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating [AI safety] risks and careful about what we choose to open source,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post published on the Meta website.
Zuckerberg’s latest AI musing is a backslide from his thoughts just a year ago, when he published an essay titled “Open Source AI is the Path Forward”. At the time, Meta’s open-source Llama was the world’s most advanced and popular, although since then Chinese open-source models have been catching up, especially since DeepSeek’s open models burst onto the scene.
Instead, Meta is hiring a team of top AI scientists to work on personal “superintelligence”. Zuckerberg noted that his company would differ from other AI firms as Meta aimed to bring “personal superintelligence to everyone”.
Meanwhile, OpenAI was expected to launch GPT-5 this month, reportedly the world’s most powerful AI model.
A ranking on Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI platform, showed that as of Thursday eight of the 10 most popular models were developed by Chinese firms, including start-ups Zhipu and Moonshot AI, as well as video gaming giant Tencent Holdings and Alibaba.
Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of Political Science at George Washington University, said Zuckerberg’s latest announcement “would have been more meaningful if it was made when Meta’s open-source models were pushing the frontier, instead of at the present time, when they are far from the state-of-the-art”.
