Artificial intelligence (AI) search engines are sending significantly less referral traffic to news sites and blogs compared to traditional Google searches, according to a new report by content licensing platform TollBit. The report found that AI developers’ scraping of websites has more than doubled in recent months.
OpenAI, Perplexity, Meta, and other AI companies have made claims that their AI-powered search engines will provide new sources of income for publishers by directing more readers to their sites. However, the reality is starkly different. The report analyzed 160 websites over the last three months of 2024 and found that AI search engines send only 96% less referral traffic to news sites and blogs than traditional Google searches.
The report also found that each page was scraped about seven times on average by these AI companies. CEO Toshit Panigrahi told Forbes that “we are seeing an influx of bots that are hammering these sites every time a user asks a question,” citing the demand for publisher content as nontrivial.
Despite this, many publishers are struggling to maintain their search traffic and revenue. Edtech company Chegg recently sued Google, alleging that the search giant’s AI-generated summaries included content from its website without attribution. The lawsuit was filed after Chegg’s traffic plummeted 49% in January year-over-year, largely due to Google’s AI summaries.
Travel booking sites like Kayak and TripAdvisor are also concerned about Google’s AI search overviews chipping away at their traffic. Meanwhile, news publishers have taken legal action against both OpenAI and Perplexity for allegedly infringing on their intellectual property.
TollBit collected the data from publishers that have signed up on its platform for analytics, giving it insight into traffic and scraping activity on their sites. The report found that even when publishers block Perplexity from accessing their sites, the AI startup continues to send referral traffic back to them.
Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas said the republishing feature, called Perplexity Pages, has “rough edges” in response to criticism. However, a group of publishers including Condé Nast, Vox and The Atlantic filed a lawsuit against enterprise AI company Cohere for allegedly scraping 4,000 copyrighted works from the internet.
To address this problem, some companies are exploring new economic models for publishers in the age of artificial intelligence. TollBit charges AI companies each time they scrape content from a publisher’s site, while others are looking into licensing articles directly.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2025/03/03/openai-perplexity-ai-search-traffic-report