Digital news platforms, which depend on search engine traffic, are now suffering huge losses due to AI-powered search tools. AI search engines like OpenAI, Perplexity and Google have completely changed the way we get information online. A new study by content licensing platform TollBit has found that news websites and blogs are getting 96% less traffic from AI search engines than traditional Google search.
Increase in data scraping from websites
According to this study, tech companies are increasing data scraping (collecting data surreptitiously) from websites to train their AI models. 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 (20 lakh) times in the fourth quarter of 2024. Each web page was scraped an average of 7 times.
Website owners are not aware
Developers collect data from websites using AI bots or web crawlers, although website owners and publishers are often not aware of this data access because AI companies do not reveal the true identity of their bots. TollBit reported that Perplexity’s AI bots scraped data from a publisher’s website 500 times, but only sent 10,000 referral traffic to the site. This AI search startup has previously been accused of scraping website data without permission and not following robots.txt protocol.
Huge drop in web traffic due to AI search
Earlier companies like OpenAI and Perplexity claimed that their AI-powered search engines would send more readers to websites and become a source of new revenue for publishers. But according to a Gartner report, AI chatbots and virtual agents will cause a 25% drop in website search traffic by 2026.
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Recently, American adtech 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, compared to just 8% in the second quarter of 2024, when Google launched AI Overview.