Obnews Tech Desk: Digital news websites, which were still dependent on search engine traffic, are now suffering heavy losses due to AI-operated search tools. AI search engines such as Openai, Perplexity and Google have completely changed the way you reach online information. A new study by Tollbit has revealed that due to AI search engine, news websites and blogs are getting 96% less traffic than traditional Google search.

Website data scraping boom

According to this report, tech companies are increasing data scraping (collecting data without permission) from websites, making their AI models better. Tollbit analyzed over 160 news, technology and shopping blogs between October and December 2024. The report revealed that companies like Openai, Perplexity and META scrapped data from websites in the fourth quarter of 2024, where each webpage was scraped 7 times on an average.

Website owners do not get information

Developers collect data from websites using AI bots and web cracks, but publishers and website owners are often not aware of this. This is because many AI companies hide the correct identity of their bots. According to Tollbit's report, AI Bots of Perplexity scrapped data 500 times from a website, but got only 10,000 referral traffic. Earlier, this AI search startup has been accused of not following data scraping and not following Robots.txt protocol.

Web traffic declines drastically

Companies like Openai and Perplexity had earlier claimed that their AI-research engines would send more traffic to websites and become a new income source for publishers. But according to Gartner reports, search traffic of websites is likely to fall by 25% by 2026 due to AI chatbots and virtual agents.

Recently, American Edtech company Chegg filed a suit on Google. Chegg claims that Google's AI-based search summit has severely affected the traffic of his website. In January 2025, Chegg's search traffic fell by 49%, while the decline in the second quarter of 2024 was just 8%, when Google launched AI overviews.

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Trouble reason

The increasing influence of the AI-operated search engine has created a big challenge for digital publishers and news websites. Problems such as decline of website traffic, data scraping and AI lack of transparency of AI are becoming a threat to the publishing industry. In the coming time, it will be interesting to see if the publishers adopt any strategy against this change or try to keep pace with new AI trends.