AI Disadvantages: News websites are suffering huge losses due to the arrival of AI search engines, traffic has dropped by 96%

Digital news websites, which depend on search traffic, now suffer enormous losses due to AI search tools. AI search engines like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google have completely changed how we get information online. Based on a new report by content licensing platform TollBit, news websites, and blogs get 96% fewer visitors from AI search engines than from traditional Google searches.

According to this study, tech companies are increasing data scraping (collecting data secretly) from websites so that their AI models can be trained. TollBit reported that more than 160 websites related to national and local news, consumer technology, and shopping blogs were analyzed between October and December 2024. According to the report, companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Meta scraped websites two million times in the fourth quarter of 2024. Each web page was scraped an average of 7 times.

Developers get information from websites using AI bots or web crawlers, with publishers and site owners unaware in most instances because AI companies do not reveal the actual identity of bots. TollBit has reported that Perplexity's AI bots scraped a publisher's website 500 times and sent a mere 10,000 referral traffic to the site. This AI search agency has also made headlines in the past for scraping website details without permission and disregarding the robots.txt protocol.

Earlier, companies like OpenAI and Perplexity had promised that AI-based search engines would drive more visitors to websites and offer new sources of revenue to publishers. But according to a report by Gartner, AI chatbots and virtual agents will lead to a 25% decrease in search traffic to websites by 2026.

Recently, American edtech company Chegg sued Google. Chegg claims that Google's AI-generated search summaries have harmed its website traffic. Chegg's search traffic fell by 49% in January 2025, while the decline was just 8% in the second quarter of 2024, when Google launched AI Overview.