Chatbots from companies like OpenAI and Google appear to be sucking up much-needed traffic to websites and massively screwing publishers over in the process.AsForbes reports, new data from the content licensing platform TollBit shows that AI chatbots send a whopping 96 percent less traffic to publishers' websites than traditional search engines even as companies like OpenAI and Perplexity promise tangible gains to media companies that partner with them.When looking at metrics for 160 news and blogging publishers, TollBit found that AI companies' botsscraped those sites an average of two million times during the fourth quarter of 2024. Each page was scraped around seven times on average a click-stealing scheme, if you will, that results in zero ad revenue for the publishers involved, since bot clicks don't generate any money for advertisers."We are seeing an influx of bots that are hammering these sites every time a user asks a question," explained Toshit Panigrahi, TollBit's CEO, in an interview with Forbes. "The amount of demand for publisher content is nontrivial."Though chatbots do include links to original source sites when spitting out answers to questions that would otherwise be posed to a traditional search engine, these AI services also summarize the information scraped from those sites. As such, there's no reason for users to visit the links because the answer is already right there.Some publishers, like the textbook marketplace-turned-edtech company Chegg, are already feeling and fighting the financial burn from its work being repurposed as AI results.In a newly filed lawsuit, Chegg alleges that Google has "profoundly" harmed the publisher's ad revenue by including its content in the search giant's AI Overview feature. During a recent earnings call, Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz admitted that the damage to the publisher's bottom line is so severe, the company is considering going private or being acquired."Unfortunately, traffic is being blocked from ever coming to Chegg," Schultz said during the call, "because of Googles AIO and their use of Cheggs content to keep visitors on their own platform."Along with hiring Goldman Sachs to conduct a "strategic review" of just how many hundreds of millions of dollars the company has lost, Chegg also retained the Susman Godfrey law firm for its suit against Google and according to Ian Crosby, a partner at that practice, Google's AI Overviews are a "threat to the internet."Share This Article