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.
It's wreaking havoc on the digital publishing world, an industry that continues to rely on advertising and affiliate revenue from genuine, human traffic. 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but they're not immune to errors — or "hallucinations" — that can report completely incorrect information scraped from outdated (or just plain irrelevant) sources.
