Is AI Slop Killing the Internet?

Artificial intelligence tools are transforming the way that people find information on the internet. And this change is happening faster than publishers can adapt. When users question chat bots rather than using search engines, they're given answers rather than links to follow. And this is changing the economics of the internet and in particular the economics of news providers who spend money gathering information that they can no longer monetize.

Over the last few years, millions of users have switched from search engines to AI chat tools for research recommendations and real-time answers. Tools like ChatGpt, Claude, and Perplexity are now directly answering questions that once sent readers to primary online sources that they felt they could trust. As users drift from trusted news sources, they place growing faith in AI systems trained to mimic authority. Tools that scrape the web for answers but offer no accountability.

About a year ago, Google rolled out AI overviews and then more recently AI mode features that answer questions directly on the Google search page, often without crediting the original sources. For users, this feels seamless. They don't have to constantly refine their search terms to find the information they were looking for, and they don't have to read 10 different articles to work out an answer to their question. But for publishers, this has been disastrous.

A report by Enders Analysis based on Cyric's data was released a few weeks ago showing that news visibility in search results has collapsed. The Mirror's presence on Google is down 80% since 2019. The Mail has lost more than half. Even the Financial Times, a specialist publication with a loyal subscriber base, saw a 21% drop in traffic this spring.

The report attributes this decline primarily to changes in Google systems, in particular, the roll out of AI overviews and AI mode rather than publisher strategy. This shift is structural. AI tools are intercepting the audience before they reach the source of the information that they're seeking. Google's AI overviews is doing this even for users who weren't looking for an AI answer.

Publishers can't opt out from this without disappearing from search entirely. Meaning that the economic model that sustained journalism, clicks, subscriptions, and advertising is being rapidly eroded by systems that extract value from news providers without returning any. This chart from The Economist shows that news and media are by no means ...