A recent study by GfK DAM, the official measurement system for Spain’s media industry, is very clear about artificial intelligence: less than 0.2% of queries to tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity end in a click to a news story. In this context, the challenge for news outlets is enormous because it is no longer a matter of big tech leaning toward zero click, it is that it is truly almost zero.
According to the study, in just three years AI tools have reached nearly 50% penetration among Spanish internet users, growing four times faster than social networks did in their day. That lightning fast adoption is inversely proportional to the traffic sent to the sources of information because users now find the answers on the platform itself and do not feel the need to leave it at any point.
Despite rapid growth and adoption, AI’s contribution to digital news traffic remains marginal, below 0.25% of total visits. The analysis also distinguishes the behavior of the main platforms, Perplexity sends around 0.6% of traffic to news outlets while ChatGPT’s contribution is around 0.2%, percentages that are still tiny compared with the weight search engines and social networks carry in the audience mix of most publishers.
As we already knew, the study confirms that evergreen or timeless content is the most exposed and its organic traffic decline ranges from 20% to 65% in categories such as tutorials, recipes, anniversaries, dictionaries or health. The reason is the AI 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 therefore erode one of the classic pillars of long term content strategies.
GfK DAM estimates that in two years AI will already be widely used by the general public, broadening the problem for news outlets. The same study proposes some solutions, such as creating premium content, ‘no scrapeable’, building audience loyalty through subscription models or betting on regional or local information.
In this context, CMS must not only enable fast content editing, they must also protect content through smart subscription or paywalls and other systems and provide tools for building communities that sustain news outlets. Generative AI is barely going to send traffic to news outlets on the one hand, as the study shows, but on the other it is also an ally and many newsroom and CMS use cases are already being described.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
