Clicks historically funded online journalism by driving ad and affiliate revenue that pays reporters. Generative AI systems like Google's AI Overviews and OpenAI's ChatGPT now crawl and summarize publisher content, often redirecting pageviews and reducing human traffic. AI-generated summaries can produce errors or "hallucinations" by reporting incorrect information from outdated or irrelevant sources. Many AI crawlers have harvested data without compensation, recycling content into summaries that may prevent readers from clicking to original sources. Perplexity provides an answer engine, Perplexity Assistant, and the Comet browser, and has announced a method to compensate publishers for content use.
For the most part, clicks have kept online journalism alive and (mostly) thriving before generative AI models started to appear. Clicks should lead to revenue, which pays the reporters behind news and editorial articles across the web. However, various artificial intelligence bots, like Google's AI Overviews for search and OpenAI's ChatGPT, are now actively crawling this content and redirecting page views from those same clicks.
AI-generated summaries can be convenient for readers when they work as intended, but they're not immune to errors - or "hallucinations" - that can report completely incorrect information scraped from outdated (or just plain irrelevant) sources. Still, these AI crawlers have enjoyed an unchallenged free pass to harvest data from a wealth of websites across various publishers, recycling the information they find into a digestible chunk of text to potentially stop readers from ever clicking through to its source,
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