A recent study by GfK DAM in Spain is very clear when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI): less than 0.2% of queries to tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity end in a click through to a news story. In this context, the challenge for media outlets is enormous, since it is no longer just a trend among big tech companies toward zero click, it is that the figure is in practice almost zero.
Always according to the study, in barely three years AI tools have reached almost 50% penetration among Spanish internet users, growing four times faster than social networks did in their day. The extremely rapid adoption is inversely proportional to the traffic that is sent to the original information sources, since users now find the answers directly on the platform itself and do not feel the need to leave it at any point.
Despite rapid growth and adoption, the contribution of AI to traffic for digital media remains marginal, below 0.25% of total visits. The analysis also differentiates the behaviour of the main platforms: Perplexity sends around 0.6% of traffic to media outlets while ChatGPT’s contribution is around 0.2%, figures that are still tiny compared with the weight that search engines and social networks have in the audience mix of most publishers.
As was already known, the study confirms that evergreen or timeless content produced by media outlets is the most exposed, and its decline in organic traffic ranges between 20% and 65% in categories such as tutorials, recipes, anniversaries, dictionaries or health. The reason is the AI generated summaries that search engines now produce which, although they can and in fact often do contain errors, tend to answer the user’s question and as a result erode one of the classic pillars of long term content strategies.
GfK DAM estimates that in two years AI will already be widely used across society, thereby generalising the problem for media outlets. The same study suggests several solutions, such as creating premium content ‘no scrapeable’, building audience loyalty through subscription models or betting on regional or local information.
In this context, CMSs must not only enable fast editing of content but also protect content through intelligent subscription or paywalls and other systems and provide tools for building communities that support media outlets. Generative AI will hardly send any traffic to media outlets on the one hand, as the study shows, but on the other hand it is also an ally and many uses for it are already being described in newsrooms and CMSs.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
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