Last week, New York Magazine’s Charlotte Klein launched a thousand group chats with her look at Google Zero, the latest hit to website traffic brought on by the leading search engine’s AI Overview.
In short: Google, everyone’s favorite search engine and no one’s favorite social network, used to send users to external sites to find what they were seeking; now, the user is met with a summary and buried links to the original posts. It’s as if you asked a librarian to help you find a book and instead of offering up the Dewey Decimal number, they summarized it for you. Oh, and they might be wrong, probably didn’t even read the book, yet deliver their summary with an air of authority.
This is very much a win for Google since they get to keep you on their pages. It’s also a major loss for website operators who will never benefit from you actually seeing the things they publish, the ads that keep most websites afloat, or the crucial subscribe button.
I witnessed this first hand earlier this year when I worked at a different website. One day, everyone noticed our traffic had fallen off a cliff. Tens of thousands of views had just disappeared as if whole segments of our audience had been raptured. Was a competitor beating us? Were our stories boring? Were the headlines insufficiently SEO-friendly? Were the analytics broken?
The swift disappearance of readers was frustrating and somewhat eerie. For days, a feeling of recrimination hung over the office: Who could we blame for our mass reader extinction event?
I’ll save you the trouble of searching for it: Hi, Google’s the problem.
In New York, Klein pointed to other culprits as well, including changes at X that have diminished the rate of clicks, making Elon Musk’s CEO-shedding social experiment even less publisher-friendly than when it was still a social media platform called Twitter.
Back when it was a functioning company, Twitter was famously stingy sending traffic back to publishers, but it was still a place where journalists and news orgs could congregate without being doxxed, nudified, or trolled by MechaHitler. As such, it served as a noisy, crowded bazaar where we could tout our wares. Now it’s more like the dead mall in Gone Girl where Amazing Amy goes to buy a gun or the post-fallout streets of Chernobyl overrun by mutant wolves.
That publications are suddenly waking up to this new reality is a good opportunity to subtly congratulate ourselves at Gazetteer SF. Since our launch in 2024, we’ve maintained that Google, X, Meta, Apple, and the rest are not our partners. They do not support our mission as journalists. When they decide it no longer suits them to acknowledge our work, they simply won’t.
That so many of our peers considered these companies to be their friends, that major and minor newsrooms trusted these companies to do right by them for so long, was a complete misunderstanding of what the tech companies do. The major tech platforms are not publishers or our fulfillment houses: They are surveillance companies, data miners, ad networks, software makers, and whatever else will deliver quarter-on-quarter profits for their shareholders. That publishers kept thinking these companies would work with them, support them, benevolently guide them to profitability was about as naive as Charlie Brown thinking Lucy van Pelt is a holder.
So, what good can come from realizing that journalism’s ball will always be yanked away by our tech frenemies? It certainly clarifies some things. Google Zero reminds us that the relationship that matters is not with Google et. al., but with readers. We gotta keep our eye on the ball and create work that people (not platforms) want to consume and, ideally, pay for.
If that work happens to succeed on the platforms (whatever that means this week), so be it, but we have to stop making it — and remaking ourselves — in their image.
