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When Search Becomes the Answer: How Generative AI Is Reshaping Web Traffic and Value
Generative AI is transforming search engines from gateways that direct consumers to websites into “answer engines” that increasingly provide information directly. But what happens to the publishers and content creators whose information powers those answers?
Using the rollout of Google’s AI Overviews and traffic to Wikipedia, this research shows that AI-generated search summaries meaningfully reduce visits to underlying content. The findings point to a growing challenge for publishers, brands, and platforms: as AI intermediaries increasingly answer consumers’ questions themselves, how will attention, traffic, and value be distributed across the digital content ecosystem?
speaker
Hema Yoganarasimhan is a faculty member at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. She is recognized as one of the leading experts in quantitative marketing. Hema’s research brings together large-scale marketing data, economic theory, econometrics, generative AI, and machine learning tools to help firms optimize and automate their marketing decisions. She currently serves as a senior editor at Marketing Science. Her recent work covers a wide variety of topics, including mobile advertising, content optimization, adaptive pricing and promotions, combining bandits and LLMs to improve experimentation, measurement of media polarization using image data, and personalized policy design for search rankings, promotions, and social media. Together, her recent body of work presents creative yet technically viable solutions to the challenges that businesses face in today’s world.